The Avant Garde And American Postmodernity

Was there a sudden break in the world of art, literature, and music when modernism gave way to postmodernism? Philip Nel attacks the notion of tremendous and sudden change in artistic understanding and literary practice. Instead, in The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks he proposes that a series of small but far-reaching changes drew understanding from modernism to postmodernism. What bonds these two periods together? The constant agent of change, Nel argues, was the avant-garde. Tracking its influence on novelists, popular culture figures, and children's authors, this book re-evaluates how twentieth-century culture has been traditionally divided into "modern" and "postmodern." Suggesting that a modernism and postmodernism division prevents accurate evaluation of a work, Nel realigns our conceptions of twentieth-century literature, art, and music. Focusing on eight figures--Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Dr. Seuss, Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Chris Van Allsburg, Laurie Anderson, and Leonard Cohen--as representative, The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks examines works along a spectrum of political involvement. This first book to analyze postmodern children's literature revives the radical Dr. Seuss by reading him alongside avant-garde artists. Nel argues that Chris Van Allsburg speaks the internet generation's vernacular, using a surrealist idiom to pose questions that linger beyond his picture books' final pages. The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks is a nuanced and wide-ranged re-reading of how postmodernism displays art's ability to imagine a better world. Philip Nel is an assistant professor of English at Kansas State University. He is the author of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter Novels: A Reader's Guide. He has been published in Children's Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature.

An evaluation that tracks American culture's shift from modernism into postmodernism

"This book addresses how discourses of cultural nationalism and avant-gardism have structured the formation of American poetry canons. Examining William Carlos Williams's importance for postmodern poetry, it underscores how his literary reputation has figured prominently in recent reconsiderations of twentieth-century American literary history. The postmodern poets responding to Williams emphasize not only the cultural politics of constructing literary reputations, but also a more fundamental assumption that governs canon formation, the assumption that "poetic language" excludes speech types marking social difference." "Williams's commitment to experimentation and the destruction of traditional forms allies his poetics with the critical stance of the international avant-garde. His writing is especially sensitive, however, to linguistic registers of social difference in the United States. Focusing especially on Williams's early experimentation with poetic form, through Spring and All, but also on his critical and imaginative prose, such as In the American Grain, this book argues that two contingent rhetorical motives structure his response to cultural change: what Lowney calls the "poetics of descent" and the "poetics of dissent.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Challenges conventional approaches to the avant-garde through a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary take on postmodernism.

Guy Davenport (1927–2005), an American writer of fiction, poetry, criticism, and essays, a translator, painter, intellectual, and teacher, brought a breadth and depth of knowledge to his pursuits that few other writers could approach, let alone appraise. In Andre Furlani, this twentieth-century American master has finally found an apt critical reader. In this first sustained critical study of Davenport, Furlani elucidates the depths of Davenport's fiction and its poetic precedents, brings a rare understanding to the author's reworking of twentieth-century literature and intellectual history, and offers unusual insight into his compositional technique. Furlani explores key themes across the spectrum of Davenport's fiction: pastoral utopia; twentieth-century dystopia; sexual ethics; the mythologizing of childhood; the inseparability of the archaic and the modern; and a celebration of the union of sophia, eros, and poesia. Whether Davenport's view of art and the cosmos should be called "postmodern" is a question that Furlani considers closely--offering, finally, a new aesthetic for this American original who, in these pages, at last receives the thorough and meticulous attention he has long merited.

In Theorizing the Avant-Garde Richard Murphy mobilizes theories of the postmodern to challenge our understanding of the avant-garde and assesses its importance for the debates among theorists of postmodernism such as Jameson, Eagleton, Lyotard and Habermas. Murphy reconsiders the classic formulations of the avant-garde and investigates the relationship between art and politics via a discussion of Marcuse, Adorno and Benjamin. Combining close textual readings of a wide range of films as well as works of literature, this interdisciplinary project will appeal to all those interested in twentieth-century modernist movements and postmodernity.

This text investigates modern British poetry and the death of that poetry in American critical circles. It explores the relations of British and American poetries, challenging reductive American views of British poetry.

Sigmar Polke is a highly exemplary Postmodernist and perhaps one the most indicative of a truly European avant-garde culture. This book presents a number of critiques which shed light on Polke’s otherwise bewildering display of stylistic references, apparent changes of allegiance and often unorthodox techniques of production.