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Twilight of the Avant-Garde addresses the central problem of contemporary Spanish poetry: the attempt to preserve the scope and ambition of modernist poetry at the end of the twentieth century. Offering a critical analysis of Luis Garcìa Montero’s “poetry of experience,” and the work of José Angel Valente and Antonio Gamoneda, among others, Mayhew challenges received notions about the value of poetic language in relation to the society and culture at large. Ultimately championing the survival of more challenging and ambitious modes of poetic writing in the postmodern age, this volume argues that the cultural ambition of modernist poetics remains alive and well in our age of cynicism.
Eighteen essays written by Buchloh over the last twenty years, each looking at a single artist within the framework of specific theoretical and historical questions. Some critics view the postwar avant-garde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from the first two decades of the twentieth century. Others view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specific conditions of cultural production in the postwar period. Benjamin Buchloh, one of the most insightful art critics and theoreticians of recent decades, argues for a dialectical approach to these positions.This collection contains eighteen essays written by Buchloh over the last twenty years. Each looks at a single artist within the framework of specific theoretical and historical questions. The art movements covered include Nouveau Realisme in France (Arman, Yves Klein, Jacques de la Villegle) art in postwar Germany (Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter), American Fluxus and pop art (Robert Watts and Andy Warhol), minimalism and postminimal art (Michael Asher and Richard Serra), and European and American conceptual art (Daniel Buren, Dan Graham). Buchloh addresses some artists in terms of their oppositional approaches to language and painting, for example, Nancy Spero and Lawrence Weiner. About others, he asks more general questions concerning the development of models of institutional critique (Hans Haacke) and the theorization of the museum (Marcel Broodthaers); or he addresses the formation of historical memory in postconceptual art (James Coleman). One of the book's strengths is its systematic, interconnected account of the key issues of American and European artistic practice during two decades of postwar art. Another is Buchloh's method, which integrates formalist and socio-historical approaches specific to each subject.
Working in Germany between the two world wars, John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, 1891–1968) developed an innovative method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. As a pioneer of modern photomontage, he sliced up mass media photos with his iconic scissors and then reassembled the fragments into compositions that utterly transformed the meaning of the originals. In John Heartfield and the Agitated Image, Andrés Mario Zervigón explores this crucial period in the life and work of a brilliant, radical artist whose desire to disclose the truth obscured by the mainstream press and imperial propaganda made him a de facto prosecutor of Germany’s visual culture. Zervigón charts the evolution of Heartfield’s photomontage from an act of antiwar resistance into a formalized and widely disseminated political art in the Weimar Republic. Appearing on everything from campaign posters to book covers, the photomonteur’s notorious pictures challenged well-worn assumption and correspondingly walked a dangerous tightrope over the political, social, and cultural cauldron that was interwar Germany. Zervigón explains how Heartfield’s engagement with montage arose from a broadly-shared dissatisfaction with photography’s capacity to represent the modern world. The result was likely the most important combination of avant-garde art and politics in the twentieth century. A rare look at Heartfield’s early and middle years as an artist and designer, this book provides a new understanding of photography’s role at this critical juncture in history.
Octavio Paz launches a far-ranging excursion into the "incestuous and tempestuous" relations between modern poetry and the modern epoch. From the perspective of a Spanish-American and a poet, he explores the opposite meanings that the word "modern" has held for poets and philosophers, artists, and scientists. Tracing the beginnings of the modern poetry movement to the pre-Romantics, Paz outlines its course as a contradictory dialogue between the poetry of the Romance and Germanic languages. He discusses at length the unique character of Anglo-American "modernism" within the avant-garde movement, and especially vis- -vis French and Spanish-American poetry. Finally he offers a critique of our era's attitude toward the concept of time, affirming that we are at the "twilight of the idea of the future." He proposes that we are living at the end of the avant-garde, the end of that vision of the world and of art born with the first Romantics.
An evaluation that tracks American culture's shift from modernism into postmodernism
"Twentieth-century poetry engages in a highly self-conscious meditation on the nature of poetic language. Spanish poetry, however, has sometimes been considered an exception to this tendency. This book, with its focus on linguistic self-reflexivity, refutes the notion that major Spanish poets such as Jorge Guillen and Vicente Aleixandre are theoretically naive creators. In a series of nuanced readings, Jonathan Mayhew demonstrates the extent to which modern Spanish poets are conscious of their linguistic medium." "Previous books on Spanish poetry published in English have been more limited in scope, usually including poets of a single "generation." The Poetics of Self-Consciousness is the first to study well-known writers of the earlier part of the century along with more recent poets such as Jose Angel Valente, Jaime Gil de Biedma, Jose Maria Alvarez, and Juan Lamillar. Interpreting poetic texts written from the 1920s through the 1980s, Mayhew is able to trace the evolving function of literary self-consciousness in Spanish poetry while remaining attentive to the differences among writers of the same historical moment. The modernist poets of the earlier part of the century are preoccupied by the problem of literary mimesis: the representation of reality through language. In the postwar years, poets turned their attention to the social and ethical dimensions of poetic language. The postmodernists of more recent decades, finally, are increasingly concerned with their own belatedness with respect to cultural traditions of the past." "Critics hailed Jonathan Mayhew's first book, Claudio Rodriguez and the Language of Poetic vision, as an "enlightening and timely book on perhaps Spain's greatest living poet," and "a signal first effort from a critic with high scholarly standards and a penetrating insight into contemporary poetry." With The Poetics of Self-Consciousness: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry, readers will discover another probing study of other modern and postmodern Spanish poets."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Convinced that all aspects of modern culture have been affected by avant-garde art, Renato Poggioli explores the relationship between the avant-garde and civilization. Historical parallels and modern examples from all the arts are used to show how the avant-garde is both symptom and cause of many major extra-aesthetic trends of our time, and that the contemporary avant-garde is the sole and authentic one.
By Amos Vogel. Foreword by Scott MacDonald.
The cultural Cold War in Latin America was waged as a war of values--artistic freedom versus communitarianism, Western values versus national cultures, the autonomy of art versus a commitment to liberation struggles--and at a time when the prestige of literature had never been higher. The projects of the historic avant-garde were revitalized by an anti-capitalist ethos and envisaged as the opposite of the republican state. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City charts the conflicting universals of this period, the clash between avant-garde and political vanguard. This was also a twilight of literature at the threshold of the great cultural revolution of the seventies and eighties, a revolution to which the Cold War indirectly contributed. In the eighties, civil war and military rule, together with the rapid development of mass culture and communication empires, changed the political and cultural map. A long-awaited work by an eminent Latin Americanist widely read throughout the world, this book will prove indispensable to anyone hoping to understand Latin American literature and society. Jean Franco guides the reader across minefields of cultural debate and histories of highly polarized struggle. Focusing on literary texts by Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Roa Bastos, and Juan Carlos Onetti, conducting us through this contested history with the authority of an eyewitness, Franco gives us an engaging overview as involving as it is moving.
These essays demonstrate Balakian's belief that the fate of literature "needs the snowflake not to ring the bell to any particular tune but to maintain a seasonal balance in the literary climate."