Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity: 32 (Literature, Culture, Theory, Series Number 32)
Cambridge University Press, 11/26/2010
EAN 9780521648691, ISBN10: 0521648696
Paperback, 336 pages, 21.6 x 14 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
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.
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.