Children's Literature and the Avant-Garde Druker, Elina; Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina
John Benjamins Publishing Company eBooks,
2015, 2015-07-29, Volume:
5
eBook, Book
Open access
This chapter addresses what an avant-garde for children might look like, and what it might do. It is called "Surrealism for Children: Paradoxes and Possibilities" because the very notion of an ...avant-garde for children strikes the author as both paradoxical and not, and as both possible and impossible. In making this claim, the author argues with - and revises - his own analysis in The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks (2002), which took for granted that an avant-garde for children was both possible and critically viable. What he once accepted as a certainty, he now thinks of as an intriguing question. The answer resides among the three main (and overlapping) areas around which the paradoxes and possibilities of a Surrealist children's literature circulate: knowledge, experience, and audience.
An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook takes a new approach to interpreting 1920s and 1930s picturebooks by prominent Russian writers, artists, and intellectuals by examining them within ...the ecological environment that, first, made them possible and, then, led to their demise. It argues that naturalistic models of the complex interactions of dynamic systems offer effective tools for understanding the fraught interrelations of art and censorship in the early Soviet period. Through illustrative case studies, it mounts a close analysis of word and image and their synergistic interplay in avant-garde picturebooks, while also recontextualizing them within the ecology of their original environment where extraordinary countervailing forces played out a drama of which these books survive as telling artifacts. Ultimately, it argues that the Russian avant-garde picturebook offers a uniquely illustrative example of literary ecology that sheds light on issues of creativity and censorship, politics and art, more broadly as well.
In 1960, when World War II might seem to have been receding into
history, a number of artists and writers instead turned back to it.
They chose to confront the unprecedented horror and mass killing ...of
the war, searching for new creative and political possibilities
after the conservatism of the 1950s in the long shadow of genocide.
Al Filreis recasts 1960 as a turning point to offer a
groundbreaking account of postwar culture. He examines an eclectic
group of artistic, literary, and intellectual figures who strove to
create a new language to reckon with the trauma of World War II and
to imagine a new world. Filreis reflects on the belatedness of this
response to the war and the Holocaust and shows how key works
linked the legacies of fascism and antisemitism with American
racism. In grappling with the memory of the war, he demonstrates,
artists reclaimed the radical elements of modernism and brought
forth original ideas about testimony to traumatic history.
1960 interweaves the lives and works of figures across
high and popular culture-including Chinua Achebe, Hannah Arendt,
James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Paul Celan, John Coltrane, Frantz
Fanon, Roberto Rossellini, Muriel Rukeyser, Rod Serling, and Louis
Zukofsky-and considers art forms spanning poetry, fiction, memoir,
film, painting, sculpture, teleplays, musical theater, and jazz. A
deeply interdisciplinary cultural, literary, and intellectual
history, this book also offers fresh perspective on the beginning
of the 1960s.
The quiet avant-garde Cannamela, Danila
The quiet avant-garde,
2019, 20190301, 2019, 2019-03-01
eBook
"The blending of people and living machines is a central element in the futurist "reconstruction of the universe." However, prior to the futurist break, a group of early-twentieth-century poets, ...later dubbed crepuscolari (crepusculars), had already begun an attack against the dominant cultural system, using their poetry as the locus in which useless little objects clashed with the traditional poetry of human greatness and stylistic perfection. The Quiet Avant-Garde draws from a number of twenty-first-century theories--vital materialism, object-oriented ontology, and environmental humanities--as well as Bruno Latour's criticism of modernity to illustrate how the crepuscular movement sabotaged the modern mindset and launched the counter-discourse of the Italian avant-garde by blurring the line dividing people from "things." This liminal poetics, at the crossroad of tradition, modernism, and the avant-garde, acted as the initiator of the ethical and environmental transition from a universe subjected to humans to human-thing co-agency. This book proposes a contemporary reading of Italian twentieth-century movements and offers a foothold for scholars outside Italian studies to access authors who are still unexplored in North American literature."--
This article describes the short but remarkable sociopolitical life of the Russian rock group Pussy Riot. The group became famous in 2012 not only for the political content of its performances but ...for its transgressive performativity: its violation of established public settings and its creation of disturbing anti-authoritarianism images of today’s official Russia. The analysis aims to establish Pussy Riot as part of an avant-garde movement and as a radicalization of the very idea of the avant-garde against the familiarity of the public aspect of everyday life. Public ‘normalcy’ reveals itself to be complicit in that what should be criticized is instead taken for granted, and legitimized. Pussy Riot is a new art avant-garde in terms of both how it relates to activism, social justice, feminism, and art, and to the general public, not only to the art world.
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The linguae& litterae series, edited by Peter Auer, Gesa von Essen and Werner Frick, documents the research activities of the School of Languageand Literature of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced ...Studies (FRIAS). These research activities in literary studies and linguistics are characterized by an approach that is theoretically and methodologically "state of the art" and interdisciplinarily open. In linguistics the accent is on the corpus-based, quantitative and qualitative investigation of language; in literary studies the focus is on the comparative, transdisciplinary analysis of literary phenomena in their cultural contexts. At the same time the series deals with the productive interfaces and synergies between modern linguistics and literary studies (as well as the humanities, social and natural sciences with which they interact). It seeks a new, contemporary reformulation of the humanities research curriculum and its problem and concept orientation for the future. The series has a clear international orientation - each volume is multilingual, containing German, English and French contributions and, depending on the volume, articles in Italian or Spanish as well. Each individual volume is peer reviewed by an international editorial board. Each year 2-4 volumes are published.
The present paper proposes a theoretical approach related to the critical reception of the Romanian literary avant-garde after 2000, a literary phenomenon in‑between marginalization and recovery ...tendencies. Starting from interwar critical studies from Romania (E. Lovinescu, G. Călinescu, etc.), with predominantly negative perspectives regarding the critical reception of the avant-garde, we will observe how certain clichés of the reception of the phenomenon, seen as “extremist”, as marginal, were perpetuated, with the “barrier” of the apparently impossible literary canonization. After 2000, however, literary studies discuss the historicization of the avant-garde phenomenon, which therefore became canonical in Romanian literary history. However, several elements of the “niche” avant-garde remained in the subsidiary, in the “shadow”. This is what we call the marginal(ized), the secondary avant-garde, which includes a series of less known and researched avant-garde writers, but who contributed to the complex shaping of the avant-garde imaginary. We will analyse several types of works published after 2000, in order to highlight the complexity of the avant-garde, under constant recovery: literary anthologies (Ion Pop, Nicolae Bârna), avant-garde dictionaries (Lucian Pricop, Dan Grigorescu), several critical studies after 2000 (Ion Bogdan Lefter, Ovidiu Morar, Emilia Drogoreanu, Paul Cernat, Dan Gulea, Emanuel Modoc, Delia Ungureanu, Daniel Clinci, Petre Răileanu, Gabriela Glăvan, Ion Pop, etc.). Many of them focus on the recovery trends of some forgotten writers, with the possibility of their inclusion in the central, canonical avant-garde, while other studies pursue new research methodologies, such as the avant-garde seen in a transnational context, in world literature context, etc. An issue that we develop in the context of this extended future research, which is also highlighted upon in the present work, is that of post-Urmuz epigonism within Romanian literary avant-garde, a fact that explains the placement of many writers in the sphere of critical marginalization. Thus, many texts by less researched writers are forgotten, being always associated with the central avant-garde models, especially Urmuz, but also Tristan Tzara or other influential writers within the central avant‑garde groups. It is precisely this problem that made us analyse the way in which the writers who are part of the marginal dimension of the avant-garde are recovered through contemporary literary studies from Romania.
This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan, which emerged during the 1960s and continues to inspire designers today. The practice communicates a form of visual and material ...protest drawing on the ideologies and critical theories of the 1960s and 1970s, notably feminism, body politics, the politics of identity, and ecological, anti-consumerist and anti-institutional critiques, as well as the concept of otherness. It also presents an encounter between two seemingly contradictory concepts: luxury and the avant-garde. The book challenges the definition of design as the production of unnecessary decorative and conceptual objects, and the characterisation of Japanese design in particular as beautiful, sublime or a product of 'Japanese culture'. In doing so it reveals the ways in which material and visual culture serve to voice protest and formulate a social critique.This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan, which emerged during the 1960s and continues to inspire designers today. The practice communicates a form of visual and material protest drawing on the ideologies and critical theories of the 1960s and 1970s, notably feminism, body politics, the politics of identity, and ecological, anti-consumerist and anti-institutional critiques, as well as the concept of otherness. It also presents an encounter between two seemingly contradictory concepts: luxury and the avant-garde. The book challenges the definition of design as the production of unnecessary decorative and conceptual objects, and the characterisation of Japanese design in particular as beautiful, sublime or a product of 'Japanese culture'. In doing so it reveals the ways in which material and visual culture serve to voice protest and formulate a social critique.
