Glance at Robert Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel (2017) and you might dismiss it as a lark—albeit a clever one—far removed from modernist concerns. Sikoryak’s book, self-described on the front cover as both “complete and unabridged” as well as an “unauthorized adaptation,” reprints the entire 20,000+ words of the Apple iTunes Terms and Conditions legal agreement as was current in 2017. Each page of this so-called “graphic novel” (more on that label below) takes Apple’s corporate legales

As one of the paradigmatic literary genres of both the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, sound poetry should not merely be understood in terms of formal experimentation, but also as an intervention into the politics of language: to speak with John Cage, a kind of “demilitarization of language.” [1] Cage, however, understood this notion on a highly formal level, with influences from the philosophy of Zen, seeking to refrain from imposing expressions of the ego on his materials. In...

Although the Beats associated with the avant-garde and although “[scholars] understand the Beat Generation in terms of a literary avant-garde,” historically and from the perspective of forms and gestures, they had in fact repeated, distorted and sometimes mocked the avant-garde. [1] They may thus be defined as a neo-avant-garde. Peter Bürger describes the neo-avant-garde as a possible double failure: not only does it repeat the gestures of the avant-garde, which, according to him, failed, but by...

American Language poetry can be considered a neo-avant-garde movement, at least if we refer to Hal Foster’s definition of the term as the result of a “deferred action,” a later event that recodes the original (historical) avant-garde—e.g. Dada or Gertrude Stein—in a way that stresses “a continual process of protension and retension, a complex relay of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts.” [1] This sometimes controversially labeled “post-avant”-poetry (a term promoted, among others, by...

The present essay approaches the topic of this cluster—a Politics of Form Revisited—from a perspective that links up with current demands for reconceptualizing the relations between politics and aesthetics, based on a renewed interest in questions of collectivity. Close readings and listenings of two radio plays from the literary neo-avant-gardes will illustrate the explanatory potential of our approach: Ein Blumenstück ( A Piece of Flowers, 1968), written by the German author Ludwig Harig, a...

For a book weighing in at just under 100 pages, not counting various forewords and introductions, Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde has had an enormously outsized influence. How many books can claim to have engendered an entire volume of responses just two years after their initial publication? However, as the book’s many critics have noted, Bürger oversimplifies the complex and multifarious phenomenon of the avant-garde, pays scant attention to the specificities of individual works and artists, is overly restrictive in its selection of artists and movements, and, most infamously, dismisses the neo-avant-garde as a mere empty repetition of the historical avant-garde. Yet despite all this, Hal Foster, one of Bürger’s sharpest critics, called Theory of the Avant-Garde a “central text” on the avant-garde, and its ideas have had a lasting impact on the scholarship of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, which Bürger terms the historical avant-garde. Many scholars have rejected Bürger’s reduction of the historical avant-garde to a single factor, the negation of the autonomous status of art through a unification of art and the praxis of everyday life. Although this criticism is valid up to a point, it has been overused as a justification for the wholesale dismissal of Bürger’s argument. While the fusion of art and life was certainly not the sole concern of all the individuals and groups of the avant-garde, it was nevertheless a significant unifying factor across a wide variety of movements. Recognizing the importance of this insight does not mean accepting Bürger’s theory in its entirety, but rather raises the need to revise and expand his concept of what it means to unite art and life. The timeline of the avant-garde needs to be pushed back almost a century, to the origins of l’art pour l’art in the 1830s, which in turn requires recognizing that the avant-garde was not simply a negation of l’art pour l’art but rather both a negation and continuation of it. The range of movements encompassed by the avant-garde likewise needs to be expanded to include not only futurism, Dada, surrealism, and constructivism, but also the arts and crafts movement, aestheticism, art nouveau, the Secession and Werkstätte movements, expressionism, the Bauhaus, and de stijl, among others. While much work has already been done to apply Bürger’s analysis to these movements, and on related issues such as the corrosive form of satirical mockery known as the blague, this research has not previously been brought together into an interconnected historical narrative or used to theorize a revised account of the unification of art and life.

The cinema and aviation go arm in arm through life. They were born on the same day. —Fernand Léger, “Speaking of Cinema”

The theatre only has one chance, when it understands itself as an instrument of deceleration against the general acceleration of life, information and perception. Theatre is the Stone Age, but it can teach you how to see. —Heiner Müller

What distinguishes modernism’s legacies from the afterlives of other literary or cultural movements? To begin to answer this question, let’s glance back to 1941, when several writers of transatlantic renown composed what we might call obituaries for the modernist arts. Djuna Barnes’s “Lament for the Left Bank,” for example, an elegiac piece published in the American periodical Town and Country, memorialized a Paris made brilliant by overlapping arcs of collaborative innovation: Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes; George Antheil and Ezra Pound; Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Coco Chanel. The essay ends with the line, “The dreadful thing is not that all these things were done, but that they are over.” [1] The things that were done and the things that are over: Barnes identifies the tensions that would come to mark modernism’s legacy in the twenty-first century, the dialectical occurrences of cultural continuity and discontinuity, of originality and repetition. For Barnes, Left Bank artists in the 1920s and 1930s did “things”—a single, compact word for modernism’s kaleidoscopic transformations—that were over by 1941, a conviction varied and echoed in other coeval “art-historical post-mortems,” to borrow from Richard Meyers, by Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Anaïs Nin, and Cyril Connolly. [2]