The Avant-garde and American Postmodernity
Title | The Avant-garde and American Postmodernity PDF eBook |
Author | Philip Nel |
Publisher | Univ. Press of Mississippi |
Pages | 224 |
Release | 2002 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 9781578064908 |
Was there a sudden break in the world of art, literature, and music when modernism gave way to postmodernism? Philip Nel attacks the notion of tremendous and sudden change in artistic understanding and literary practice. Instead, in The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks he proposes that a series of small but far-reaching changes drew understanding from modernism to postmodernism. What bonds these two periods together? The constant agent of change, Nel argues, was the avant-garde. Tracking its influence on novelists, popular culture figures, and children's authors, this book re-evaluates how twentieth-century culture has been traditionally divided into "modern" and "postmodern." Suggesting that a modernism and postmodernism division prevents accurate evaluation of a work, Nel realigns our conceptions of twentieth-century literature, art, and music. Focusing on eight figures--Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Dr. Seuss, Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Chris Van Allsburg, Laurie Anderson, and Leonard Cohen--as representative, The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks examines works along a spectrum of political involvement. This first book to analyze postmodern children's literature revives the radical Dr. Seuss by reading him alongside avant-garde artists. Nel argues that Chris Van Allsburg speaks the internet generation's vernacular, using a surrealist idiom to pose questions that linger beyond his picture books' final pages. The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks is a nuanced and wide-ranged re-reading of how postmodernism displays art's ability to imagine a better world. Philip Nel is an assistant professor of English at Kansas State University. He is the author of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter Novels: A Reader's Guide. He has been published in Children's Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature.
The Avant-garde and American Postmodernity
Title | The Avant-garde and American Postmodernity PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | Univ. Press of Mississippi |
Pages | 258 |
Release | |
Genre | American literature |
ISBN | 9781617034909 |
An evaluation that tracks American culture's shift from modernism into postmodernism
THE AVANT-GARDE & AMERICAN POSTMODERNITY: SMALL INC....
Title | THE AVANT-GARDE & AMERICAN POSTMODERNITY: SMALL INC.... PDF eBook |
Author | PHILIP. NEL |
Publisher | |
Pages | |
Release | 2002 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
The American Avant-garde Tradition
Title | The American Avant-garde Tradition PDF eBook |
Author | John Lowney |
Publisher | |
Pages | 184 |
Release | 1997 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN |
"This book addresses how discourses of cultural nationalism and avant-gardism have structured the formation of American poetry canons. Examining William Carlos Williams's importance for postmodern poetry, it underscores how his literary reputation has figured prominently in recent reconsiderations of twentieth-century American literary history. The postmodern poets responding to Williams emphasize not only the cultural politics of constructing literary reputations, but also a more fundamental assumption that governs canon formation, the assumption that "poetic language" excludes speech types marking social difference." "Williams's commitment to experimentation and the destruction of traditional forms allies his poetics with the critical stance of the international avant-garde. His writing is especially sensitive, however, to linguistic registers of social difference in the United States. Focusing especially on Williams's early experimentation with poetic form, through Spring and All, but also on his critical and imaginative prose, such as In the American Grain, this book argues that two contingent rhetorical motives structure his response to cultural change: what Lowney calls the "poetics of descent" and the "poetics of dissent.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
American Culture Between the Wars
Title | American Culture Between the Wars PDF eBook |
Author | Walter B. Kalaidjian |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Pages | 378 |
Release | 1993 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 9780231082792 |
This study examines the feminist, African-American and populist avant-garde that flourished in the era of American modernism.
Regarding the Popular
Title | Regarding the Popular PDF eBook |
Author | Sascha Bru |
Publisher | Walter de Gruyter |
Pages | 501 |
Release | 2011-11-30 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 3110274698 |
Regarding the Popular charts the complex relationship between the avant-gardes and modernisms on the one hand and popular culture on the other. Covering (neo-)avant-gardists and modernists from various European countries, this second volume in the series European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies explores the nature of so-called “low” culture, dealing with aspects as diverse as the everyday and the folkloric. Regarding the Popular charts the many ways in which the allegedly “high” modernists and avant-gardists looked at and represented the “low”. As such, this book will appeal to all those with an interest in the dynamic of modern experimental arts and literatures.
Guy Davenport
Title | Guy Davenport PDF eBook |
Author | Andre Furlani |
Publisher | Northwestern University Press |
Pages | 300 |
Release | 2007-07-20 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0810123894 |
Guy Davenport (1927–2005), an American writer of fiction, poetry, criticism, and essays, a translator, painter, intellectual, and teacher, brought a breadth and depth of knowledge to his pursuits that few other writers could approach, let alone appraise. In Andre Furlani, this twentieth-century American master has finally found an apt critical reader. In this first sustained critical study of Davenport, Furlani elucidates the depths of Davenport's fiction and its poetic precedents, brings a rare understanding to the author's reworking of twentieth-century literature and intellectual history, and offers unusual insight into his compositional technique. Furlani explores key themes across the spectrum of Davenport's fiction: pastoral utopia; twentieth-century dystopia; sexual ethics; the mythologizing of childhood; the inseparability of the archaic and the modern; and a celebration of the union of sophia, eros, and poesia. Whether Davenport's view of art and the cosmos should be called "postmodern" is a question that Furlani considers closely--offering, finally, a new aesthetic for this American original who, in these pages, at last receives the thorough and meticulous attention he has long merited.