Avant-garde writing

"Aidan Higgins," Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2003 Vol. XXIII, no. 3: 49-84.

by neil murphy

Patricide and Historical Neurosis in Sandipan Chattopadhyay’s Novel Swarger Nirjan Upokule

by Arka Chattopadhyay

One of my Postgraduate papers which I later compressed into an article for Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences. It appeared in its September 2010 issue. This is the fuller version. The paper is about a novel by Sandipan Chattopadhyay and deals with the cultural politics of Western appropriation with emphasis on issues like narrative formation, historical repetition, colonialism, intertextuality and a post-colonial condition that is shadowed by a neo-colonial global politics.

Åke Hodell's "Kerberos" - A Case Study ((work in progress)

by Fred Andersson

To be published in "A Cultural History of the Nordic Avantgarde", vol 3, Copenhagen 2010 (ed. Jesper Olsson, Tania Ørum et al)

The small avant-garde book edition Kerberos was initiated and maintained by the Swedish experimental poet Åke Hodell... more The small avant-garde book edition Kerberos was initiated and maintained by the Swedish experimental poet Åke Hodell between 1963 and 1972. The total body of 16 titles issued by Kerberos mainly comprised works by young Swedish and Danish artists/writers and works by Hodell himself. The edition was instrumental for the breakthrough of Concrete/Visual Poetry in Sweden and provided inspiration for further production of experimental publications in the Swedish artworld.

American Language Poetry and the Definition of the Avant-Garde

by Jacob Edmond

Avant-Garde / Neo-Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2005. 173-194.

"Let’s do a Gertrude Stein on it": Caroline Bergvall and Iterative Poetics

by Jacob Edmond

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 3.2 (2011): 37–50.

Caroline Bergvall’s practice addresses what I call the iterative turn in contemporary culture. This turn encompasses... more Caroline Bergvall’s practice addresses what I call the iterative turn in contemporary culture. This turn encompasses poets’ use of pre-existing material and theorists’ treatment of gender, culture, and text as constituted by repeated acts. Bergvall extends Stein’s iterative writing into other forms of iteration, including performance; translation; presentations in multiple media or versions; archival, serial and conceptual forms; and the rewriting of historical texts. By placing bodily gesture at the intersection of multiple linguistic and technological mediations, Bergvall offers an alternative to existing iterative theories––one that recognizes not just the infinite possibilities of iteration but also each singularly embodied instantiation.

KEYWORDS
• multimedia • British, French, Norwegian poetry • performance • poetics •
repetition • translation • embodiment • contemporary art

A sample section from the article is available for download here.

Translation, Typography, and the Avant-Garde's Impossible Text

by Sarah Bay-Cheng

Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein, cinema, queerness, and avant-garde drama.

by Sarah Bay-Cheng

The Closures of the Open Text: Lyn Hejinian’s “Paradise Found”

by Jacob Edmond

Contemporary Literature 50.2 (Summer 2009): 240–72.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article.

I want to open up for discussion a topic that has... more In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article.

I want to open up for discussion a topic that has to date remained largely closed, due, ironically enough, to an emphasis on openness. As Meir Sternberg observes, from modernism’s “turn, in practice and theory, toward the open ending,” to poststructuralism’s “preaching [of] endless indeterminacy,” the literary-critical climate of recent decades has overwhelmingly favored openness over closure, obscuring “the family likeness underlying the extreme models” such that even “the poetics of anti-closure at its most radical” involves “multiple closure” (519–20, 568–69). Reflecting this tendency, the claim to openness pervades both the self-presentation and critical reception of Language writing, concealing the closures of its open text. This, at least, I will argue, is the case for Lyn Hejinian, one of the most prominent writers to have emerged from this highly influential late-twentieth-century U.S. literary avant-garde, and the one perhaps most closely associated with its rhetoric of openness. While, as Alan Golding notes, Language writers have used openness to signify an emphasis on linguistic opacity, autonomy, and polysemy and the rejection of organicist notions of naturalness, presence, and immediacy (“Openness” 80–88), Hejinian’s writing exhibits a striking preoccupation with total linguistic transparency, correspondence between language and world, epistemological closure, and perfect understanding, all of which she associates with the term paradise. Her essay “The Rejection of Closure” (1984), her long poem The Guard (1984), and her later essay “La Faustienne” (1998) all grow, directly or indirectly, out of this preoccupation.

Kazimir Malevich and the Problem of Theoretical Agency in Revolutionary Russia

by Brian Michael Shaw

This paper explores the conflict between the poly-mystical teleology expressed in Malevich’s theoretical writings... more This paper explores the conflict between the poly-mystical teleology expressed in Malevich’s theoretical writings supporting his Suprematist abstractions and the anti-religious and anti-formalist paradigms of Bolshevik and Soviet cultural policies.

“El verso silenciado. Algunas consideraciones sobre lo poético en Juan Larrea”

by Helena López

En Dallal, Alberto, ed. La abolición del arte. México: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (UNAM), 1998: 501-508.

Hacia Una Definición De Orbe De Juan Larrea

by Helena López

Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78.3 (2001) :361-370.

Juan Larrea Y La Revista" Favorables París Poema"

by Helena López

Revista Hispánica Moderna LIII. 1 (2000): 106-121.

Juan Larrea En El Poema"?": Impugnación De La Estética Ultraísta

by Helena López

Anales de Literatura Española Contemporánea 25.3 (2000): 239-258.