THE IDEA OF THE AVANT-GARDE

Dramatic rupture in the modern tradition causes American criticsm to distinguish between modernism and postmodernism
Postmodernism = highly controversial concept, involves distinctive philosophical, political, and aesthetic program - i.e. post-Modern age
Prefix post implies absence of positive periodizing criteria, characteristic of transitional periods Post-Modern coined by Arnold Toynbee in early 1950s
Western civilization had entered a transitional phase during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
a mutation and dramatic departure from traditions of the Modern Age
After 1954 he called this time of social unrest, world wars, and revolutions, the "post-Modern Age."
Periodization: [134]S
Early Modern (early Renaissance)
Modern (Renaissance and its aftermath)
Late Modern (from turn of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through enlightenment into nineteenth century
Post-Modern (from seventies and eighties of this century) R H R H
Post-modern age:
age of anarchy
collapse of the rationlist world view bequeathed to the West by hellenic philosophers
Belief in the conscious mind drastically challenged
new sciences - psychology, anthropology, political economy, sociology
Psychology explores the subconscious
Therefore the intellectually anarchic Late Modern and post-Modern Age
Modern Western Civilization is middle-class
Western communities became modern as soon as they produced a bourgeoisie numerous and competent enought to become the predominant element in society From 15th and 16th centuries on
Post-modern age at turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Rise of an industrial urban working class
Advent of a mass society Q R
Mass education
Mass culture
Time of Troubles with disintegration and breakdown
Toynbee a prophet rather than historian
Post-Modern hazy, quasi-apocalyptic notion--irrationality, anarchy, threatening indeterminacy, overwhelmingly negative
By 1950s, modern has distinct historical-typological meaning [136]
Postmodern - new sense of crisis after World War II R
modernism of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Kafka, Mann, no longer relevant
Used with pessimism about fate of culture in a consumer society in whcih odler intellectual
standards appeared threatened [136]
Becomes battle cry of new optimism, populist, apocalyptic, irresponsible, counterculture,
do away with old restrictions and prejudices, free imagination.
Leslie Fiedler, 1965, quasi-magical use of "post"
1959, Irving Howe among first critics of use postmodern
Transition to postmodernism with emergence of a mass society in which class distinctions become more blurred than ever in the past
traditional centers of authority, like the famiily lose some of their binding power
passivity becomes the general social attitude
Man is transformed into a consumer.
Irving Howe: "We are confronting, then, a new phase in our culture, which in motive and spring represents a wish to shake off the bleeding heritage of modernism ... The new sensibility is impatient with ideas. It is impatient with literary structures of complexity and coherence... It is sick of those magnifications of irony than Mann gave us, sick of those visions of entrapment to which Kafka led us, sick of those shufflings of daily horror and grace that Joyce left us.... It is bored with the past... [137-8]
Howe resents postmodernisms' taste for public acclain. Modernism was a minority culture.
Harry Levin (1960):
"Insofar as we are still moderns, I would argue, we are the Children of Humanism and the Enlightenment"
Post-modernism is anti-intellectual
"If we are now facing an apolcalypse, then perhaps we may need critics with apocalyptic sensibilities like George Steiner..."
Death of modernism, good news for critics favoring postmodern
Modernism had been highbrow, arrogant and esoteric
Fideler in 1970 Q Pr
Death throes of Modernism and birth pangs of Post-Modernism since 1955
Modernism's moment of triumph from just before World War I until just afer World War II
Modernism: analysis, rationality, anti-Romantic dialectic
Post-modernism, new age: apocalyptic, antirational, blatantly romantica and sentimental
Ihab Hassan (1971) contrasts modernism and postmodernism - different in all ways, equally significant
Like most Americans sees Modernism as including historical avant-garde (futurism, dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, etc., in fact all of modernism and avant-garde
Continental usage sees avant-garde as extreme of artistic negativism
Modernism includes Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound
Avant-garde includes futurism, dadaism, or surrealism.
Comparison of modernism and avant-garde
Avant-garde a deliberate and self-conscious parody of modernity itself
Hassan characteristic of recent Anglo-American criticism: reaction against New Criticism and against formalism
Postmodernism has sense of commitment, freedom from tradition (including modernist)
Divides two cultural periods Postmodernism's traits
Ubanism:
City, Global Village (McLuhan), Spaceship Earth (Fuller), city as cosmos.
World breaks into blocs, nations, tribes, clasn, parties, languages, sects
Anarchy and fragmentation
Green revolution, ecology
Dionysus incity: prison riots, urban crime, pornography, etc.
Technologism
runaway technology, genetic engineering thought control, conquest of space
art is "following the trend of ephemeralization"
"The computer as substitute consciousness or as extinction of consciousness?"
Dehumanization
Profound anti-elitism, anti-authoritariansim
Participation
Art becomes communal, optional, gratuitous or anarchic
Black canvas, black page, Silence, comedy of the absurd, black humor, insane parody
Modernism "created its own forms of Authority [postmodernism] has tended toward Anarchy...
Hassan's postmodernism is an extension and diversification of pre-World War Ii avant-garde.
Hassan's postmodernism traces back to Dada and surrealism.
antiart for antiart's sake, found object, Ducham's and Man Ray's ready-mades, chance
Avant-garde implies an elite - but committed to destruction of all elites
rejection of principle of hierarchy (surrealists claimed they had no talent
Anti-elitist because it is popular
But Beckett or Pynchon (postmodernists) are no more popular or accessible than most sophisticated modernists or avant- gardists


THE IDEA OF THE AVANT-GARDE

From Modernity to the Avant-Garde
The "Avant-Garde" Metaphor in the Renaissance: A Rhetorical Figure
The Romantic "Avante-Garde": From Politics to the Politics of Culture
Some Mid-Ninettenth-Century Writers and the Avant-Garde
Two Avant-Gardes: Attractions and Repulsions
Avant Garde and Aesthetic Extremism
The Crisis of Avant-Garde's Concept in the 1960s
Avant-Garde, Dehumanization and the End of Ideology
Avant-Garde and Postmodernism
Intellectualism, Anarchism, and Stasis
Links and Abbreviations (links are abbreviated by using the initials)

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