Theorizing the Avant-Garde
Theorizing the Avant-Garde
In Modernism, Expressionism and Theories of the Avant Garde, Richard Murphy mobilises theories of the postmodern to challenge our understanding of the avant-garde. He assesses the importance of the avant-garde for contemporary culture and for the debates among theorists of postmodernism such as Jameson, Eagleton, Lyotard and Habermas. Murphy reconsiders the classic formulation of the avant-garde in Lukacs and Bloch, especially their discussion of aesthetic autonomy, 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, it draws on a rich array of critical theories, such as those of Bakhtin, Todorov, MacCabe, Belsey and Raymond Williams. This interdisciplinary project will appeal to all those interested in modernist and avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, and provides a critical rethinking of the present-day controversy regarding postmodernity.
- Wide-ranging, interdisciplinary exploration of an important artistic movement, the avant-garde
- Incorporates a reassessment of postmodern theory
- Combines film and literary texts
Product details
April 1999Paperback
9780521648691
336 pages
216 × 140 × 19 mm
0.43kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Theories of the avant-garde
- 2. Revisions of Bürger's theory
- 3. Re-writing the discursive world: revolution and the expressionist avant-garde
- 4. Counter-discourses of the avant-garde: Jameson, Bakhtin and the problem of realism
- 5. Döblin and the avant-garde poetics of expressionist prose
- 6. Benn: modernity and the double bind of rationality
- 7. Bakhtin and double voiced discourse: Döblin's 'The Murder of a Buttercup' and the double bind
- 8. The poetics of hysteria: expressionist drama and the melodramatic imagination
- 9. Kafka's photograph of the imaginary: dialogical interplay between realism and the fantastic (the metamorphosis)
- 10. Weimar silent film and expressionism: representational instability and oppositional discourse in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
- 11. Framing the interpretation: the frame-narrative and the conflict of discourses
- 12. Towards a poetic of postmodernism: simulation, the sublime and the expressionist avant-garde
- 13. Lyotard's postmodern sublime and Habermas's 'enlightenment project of modernity': modernism, mass culture and the avant-garde
- Bibliography.
