Lindsay Ceballos examines the circles of avant-garde Russian poets who grew up alongside Chekhov’s writing and who saw in Chekhov – among many other qualities – a “realist” antagonist, fellow symbolist, “poet of despair,” paragon of moral fortitude, and ultimately a larger-than-life embodiment of the Russian cultural edifice at the turn of the century.

This chapter deals with the history of the French poetry of the First Wold War. Although, like in other belligerent countries, the production of war poetry was massive between 1914 and 1918, it remains hitherto neglected by literature scholars and historians. The genre suffered from its bad reputation. Apart from a few avant-gardists like Guillaume Apollinaire, the scholarly consensus outlined the French war poetry as a chauvinistic old-fashioned flood of words with no literary or even documentary relevance in contrast with the prose written by soldier-writers. This chapter does not try to rehabilitate the French war poetry but to sketch a typology of a significative cultural phenomenon. It shows the variety of the genre between patriotism, eulogy, irony and humour, testimony, protest, and formal research.

Guillaume Apollinaire is without doubt the most prolific French poet of the Great War. In addition to his major poetry collection, Calligrammes (1918), he wrote and published plays, stories, journalism, and criticism during the conflict. His writing is nothing if not wide ranging. He considered poetry a spiritual activity and an escape from the traditional classification of genre. He also believed there was no boundary between art and life – the two are inextricably linked – and, further, that art and life transform one another. This porous nature, not without its ambivalences and paradoxes, constitutes a major key to the interpretation of his work. The diversity and originality of his oeuvre, the trajectory of the author and the importance of his legacy help to explain how and why he became a poet of war in France, a country that ignored the tradition of 'war poets' that had developed in Great Britain.

Critical accounts of the modes in which modernist poetry responds to the First World War continue to place an emphasis on men’s responses to war, either non-combatants such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, or those who served, among them Richard Aldington and Wyndham Lewis. This chapter does consider the men of the poetic avant-garde but also focuses on women of the avant-garde – H.D., Marianne Moore, Mina Loy and Juliette Roche – to unearth the generative impact of the First World War on their poetry. As this chapter explores, the war features as subject matter and stimulus for the poetries of modernism and in the pages of modernist magazines, generating new forms and perspectives alongside the vivid expressions of anger, trauma, loss, and disillusionment. However, as this chapter also argues, women poets wrote the conflict differently; in confronting both patriarchal and military violence, the First World War became a key impetus for their feminist avant-garde poetic.

Belgium was a casus belli for the Great War in 1914 and its post-war fate was part of president Wilson’s Fourteen Points, yet there is no such thing as a Belgian canon of First World War poetry. Famous civilian poets like Émile Verhaeren were hailed in Allied propaganda, but their wartime verse is largely forgotten. Poems written in Flemish (a local variant of Dutch) are hardly ever read in the Francophone part of the country. The war and many of the Flemish poems written about it testify of a gradual crumbling of Belgian unity. Paul van Ostaijen’s 1921 Bezette Stad (Occupied City, also translated into English, French and German) is a powerful example of avant-garde typography but it is also a testament to the radical Flemish activists who, during the course of the war, started to despise their native Belgium even more than they did the German occupier. Those wounds have never really healed.

Bolaño’s work in the nineties shows him conscious of the harm that has been done to an entire generation and to the psyche of Chile. His preoccupation with the Chilean situation connects with his interest in writing fiction that recounts that loss, along with the establishment of the central pieces of the new economic world order. For him, the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) unleashes energies associated with a new world map in which the American continent is key to the necropolitics of the end of the century. Bolaño will become the main Latin American author of this period marked by multilateralism, though he is certainly not alone (a central characteristic of Latin American literature of the end of the century is a desire to become global.) Much of what he wrote in the second half of the nineties is an inquiry into Chile’s Pinochet which shows the pervasiveness of evil and the bitter conclusion the neoliberal trend has consolidated. Bolaño’s fame explodes with the publication of The Savage Detectives, which can be read as an instruction manual for contending with the market without making concessions.

According to Carpentier, Columbus rounded, rounded off, and rounded up the planet at a very high cost for the Indigenous cultures of nuestra América (our America). Gradually, a new culture emerged from all the possible hybridizations of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Carpentier also stated that, in order for the novel to exist, there had to be a tradition: the first narratives were for domestic consumption, and it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the avalanche began with El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) and Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps). It was in effect the return to Europe of the galleons that once left Palos de Moguer in Spain, but now carrying another, different, culture. Several factors contributed to Carpentier’s awakening in postwar Europe: the dominance of fiction, somewhat exhausted by the weight of tradition and tired avant-garde formulas, was supplemented by a growing interest in the documentary, thanks to advances in photography and printing. Meanwhile, in Latin America a new approach to the novel was generated via storytelling, linking the particular to the universal. The historical novel was transformed and now demonstrated, alongside an only partially explored physical world, the questions that preoccupy all humankind.

In the prologue to his novel Serafim Ponte Grande (1933), Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade wrote: “The modernista movement, which gave way to the ‘anthropophagic’ virus, seemed to indicate an advanced phenomenon. São Paulo possessed a powerful industry. Who could say that the rise of coffee couldn’t bring that semi-colonial, nouveau riche literature to the level of those costly imperialist surrealisms?” How did Latin American artists and writers relate to the profound political and economic changes that took place at the end of the 1920s? This chapter looks at Latin America’s cosmopolitan avant-garde’s rejection, incorporation, or support of the emerging internationalism triggered by the global rise of communism. It does so by examining two events: Diego Rivera’s trips to the Soviet Union and the United States, and the experience of the Brazilian Anthropophagic movement seen from the perspective of Oswald de Andrade’s transformation from cosmopolitan poet to internationalist activist.

This chapter comparatively probes the distinct trajectories of avant-garde poetics in Spanish America and Brazil from the postwar to the 1980s. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the rise of the Spanish American Vanguardias and Brazilian Modernismo, which adapted European experimental vocabularies to local contexts. Subsequently, a revival of the utopian avant-garde impulse developed into singular and divergent poetic forms of expression. This divergence can be clearly seen in, among other things, the preference in Brazil for synthetic forms and in Spanish America for the long poem. In other cases, the traditions converged in the adoption of an anti-lyrical stance, constructivist concerns, the use of long forms, and politically engaged poetry. From the 1970s on, the neo-baroque aesthetic also brought together figures from the entire region. This chapter looks at these divergences as well as points of confluence, seeking to understand how, in general, the reception of Surrealism and other poetic traditions led to a more “discursive,” personal poetry, and how the foregrounding of the materiality of language fueled synthetic, non-discursive forms.

Langston Hughes’s association with Chicago as a nexus for modernism was clearly marked in 1926, when he published four poems in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a leading journal for avant-garde poetry in the English-speaking world. This analysis considers how geocultural contexts in Chicago figured in the development of Hughes’s engagements with modernism. Examining Hughes’s jazz and blues poetry of the 1920s in light of his response to formal innovations by Chicago Renaissance poets such as Carl Sandburg as well as “high” modernists such as T. S. Eliot, I also explore how his critical engagement with Ezra Pound’s imagist poetics was shaped by the prior examples of Sandburg and Jean Toomer, and conclude with a discussion of how Hughes’s literary collaboration with Chicago luminaries such as Richard Wright and his mentorship of Gwendolyn Brooks played an important role in the creative flowering of the Black Chicago Renaissance.

This chapter traces the ways in which, in the early 1960s, the Society of Umbra, an informal community of African American writers, artists, musicians, and activists, combined elements of bohemianism and Black cultural self-determination to lay the groundwork for the Black Arts Movement. It chronicles the emergence of the group from various activist and artist organizations of the Lower East Side of New York City as these African Americans became discontent with the political limitations of bohemian nonconformity and the artistry committed only to anti-bourgeois self-cultivation. Analyzing the poetry of Lorenzo Thomas, David Henderson, and Calvin Hernton, it clarifies how these poets pursued a shared attempt to reveal how bohemian libidinal energies could be transformed from personal artistry and individual redemption into a revolutionary Black nationalist consciousness that could, in turn, lead to collective action.

The chapter analyses Faust‘s work, situating their sound within the diverse Krautrock trend and outlining their history to explain their political and artistic aims as a German music group. Faust‘s music celebrates a disruptive, avant-garde approach to rock music, influenced by dada and fluxus artists to create musical cut-ups and sound collages that blur the difference between noise and music. This methodology positions the band outside the structures of civilization, as per the framework of the Romantic hero, and reflects their conflicted disruption of German identity through the coincident political, phenomenological, and spiritual anxieties present in their music, lyrics, and performances. Faust‘s experimentation and aesthetics have influenced the ways noise has been incorporated into popular music, anticipating the development of industrial music.

In terms of musical style, the sizeable catalogue of music that falls under the label of Krautrock is as diverse as it is experimental. The difficulty in pinning down a specific ‘sound‘ for this diverse body of music can be traced to its roots in the period of cultural revival in the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter discusses how the desire to create a new German identity, distanced from the crimes of the Nazi present and freer from the influence of American culture, was reflected in this music: Krautrock musicians began to abandon the characteristics of both Anglo-American popular musics such as beat and rock ‘n’ roll, and the prevailing German style of the time, Schlager, endeavouring to create something entirely original. The chapter demonstrates how Krautrock was initially better defined by what it was not, rather than what it specifically was. However, these radically different approaches to newness shared certain characteristics. As the chapter argues, Krautrock musicians embraced innovative approaches to instrumentation, timbre, the voice, texture, and form, generating a new musical vocabulary that they could call their own.

Baron’s chapter uses the lenses of periodical culture and reception studies to situate Joyce’s writing after Ulysses in the context of his involvement with the internationalist avant-garde editorially spearheaded by Eugene Jolas and Elliott Paul in transition. As Edmund Wilson stated in 1948, “without transition, it’s an open question whether Finnegans Wake would be comprehensible at all.” This chapter first reads letters around the serializations of Ulysses and Work in Progress to argue that Joyce learnt from his dealings with The Little Review how to use transition to orchestrate the exegesis and apologia of his rule-flouting project. The chapter examines the strategies that established the Wake’s reputation as an avant-garde triumph rather than a fraudulent con; for example, Joyce’s instigation of the publication of numerous essays devoted exclusively to the praise, explanation, and defense of his work as well as his incorporation of negative views. Most importantly, the chapterwill go on to uncover the ways in which transition brought Joyce into collaborations with a cohort of admiring idealists – involving him in relationships which in turn nourished and inflected the text as he wrote it.

This chapter is an examination of Britten’s engagement with progressive musical and aesthetic thought. As a successful and popular composer, Britten is rarely identified as an ‘avant-garde’ artist, yet his career took note of progressive developments from 1930s neoclassicism to 1970s minimalism. For mid-century critics, Britten was a cosmpolitan figure; more recently, his commitment to tonality argues a ‘reactive modernism’, in dialogue with tradition. Britten’s relations to avant-garde thought involve successive historical contexts. In the 1930s, he sought to study with Berg, wrote experimental film soundtracks, and explored neoclassical parody, without abandoning key tonality. In the 1940s, Britten’s music developed greater metric complexity. Britten’s 1950s catalogue increasingly explores a personal twelve-tone thematic idiom, along with non-European percussion sonorities inspired by renewed encounters with Balinese gamelan. Criticising avant-garde ‘complication’ in the 1960s, Britten tempered public scepticism with personal support for British avant-gardists.

Cavell’s problematic concerning the art critic is taken to mistake imposing upon for finding meaning in an artwork, reading into it for hearing it out. Modernist artworks must diverge from traditional forms of expression and thus toward hermeticism to achieve their voices. If an artwork remains too close to tradition, it becomes automatic and thereby fails to achieve its voice. If an artwork moves too far into hermeticism, it becomes silent and thereby fails to achieve its voice. The critic discerns both what an artwork says and whether it speaks at all. Because the critic cannot fulfill these tasks simply by appeal to tradition or the artist’s intentions, she must interview the work itself with her own devices to identify elements in the work as keys to unlock its voice. Her vindication, however, comes not from a final analysis, but from the clarity she brings to the work, which is always subject to contestation. As the world becomes increasingly multicultural, we increasingly encounter unfamiliar people bearing complex relations to unfamiliar forms of life, heightening the challenge of hearing others out; as Cavell notes, our ways of regarding artworks resemble those of other people.

This essay focuses on “Music Decomposed” and, to a lesser extent, “A Matter of Meaning It” (they are companion pieces), contextualizing these texts, and exploring some important parallels between musical composition and philosophical authorship. Colapietro shows how, in subtle and surprising ways, some of the main themes of Cavell’s philosophical investigations are articulated in “Music Decomposed” (themes such as voice, timing, extemporaneity, contingency, deep listening, rule-following, and an uncompromising affirmation of the radical nature of human responsibility made in the teeth of one or another fashionable celebration of impersonal mechanism). Tradition and technique are necessary for creativity, even if creativity reconfigures tradition and transcends technique.

Chapter 4 examines the dialectical relationship between the rhetorical tactics of modern advertising and the performance strategies of the avant-garde. While scholars have established the influence of print advertising on Dada’s collage aesthetic, little attention has been paid to the industry’s influence on the theatrical provocations of the historical avant-garde. This chapter demonstrates how the performance repertoire of early twentieth-century advertising - in the joking assault of the street tout, the insinuated intimacy of the shill, the manufactured cultural authority of the puff, and the provocation of plants in the audience - offered a model of social engagement that avant-garde artists adopted in order to reveal the internal logic and rhetorical strategies of consumer capitalism. Entering into critical debates about the so-called neo-avant-garde, this chapter concludes by establishing a line of continuity between the historical and contemporary avant-gardes, demonstrating how avant-garde artists in post-socialist China likewise inhabit advertising’s performance repertoire when they emulate the abject logic of the shanzhai (“copycat”) to reveal how transnational capitalism is transforming social relations within the globalizing economy.

In this constellation of playwriting and new writing cultures in Poland, Ewa Guderian-Czaplińska argues that the playwright occupies a central position in twentieth-century Polish culture. In the interwar period, she charts heated dramaturgical disputes over the country’s path to modernisation. Guderian-Czaplińska proposes the term ‘ariergardist’ – artists who forfeit or reject the notion of progress inherent in the avant-garde, before analysing major writers of the postwar and contemporary periods. Marcin Kościelniak takes up Paweł Demirski’s manifesto, calling for a change in interpretive and aesthetic criteria to account for artistic innovation, to articulate contemporary forms of collaboration between writer and director, and to contest the literary associations of playwriting cultures and the modernist notion of ‘autonomous art’. Ultimately, he declares that the term text for staging offers a more accurate designation of writing and directing collaborations than ‘play’ or even ‘text for theatre’.