The author explores the role of journalism in Egypt in effecting and promoting the development of modern Arabic literature from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Remapping the literary scene in Egypt over recent decades, Kendall focuses on the independent, frequently dissident, journals that were the real hotbed of innovative literary activity and which made a lasting impact by propelling Arabic literature into the post-modern era.

The author explores the role of journalism in Egypt in effecting and promoting the development of modern Arabic literature from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Remapping the literary scene in Egypt over recent decades, Kendall focuses on the independent, frequently dissident, journals that were the real hotbed of innovative literary activity and which made a lasting impact by propelling Arabic literature into the post-modern era.

The Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy presents a range of chapters written by a highly international group of scholars from disciplines such as literary studies, arts, theatre, and philosophy to analyze the ambitions of avant-garde artists. Together, these essays highlight the interdisciplinary scope of the historic avant-garde and the interconnectedness of its artists. Contributors analyze topics such as abstraction and estrangement across the arts, the imaginary dialogue between Lev Yakubinsky and Mikhail Bakhtin, the problem of the “masculine ethos” in the Russian avant-garde, the transformation of barefoot dancing, Kazimir Malevich’s avant-garde poetic experimentations, the ecological imagination of the Polish avant-garde, science-fiction in the Russian avant-garde cinema, and the almost forgotten history of the avant-garde children’s literature in Germany. The chapters in this collection open a new critical discourse about the avant-garde movement in Europe and reshape contemporary understandings of it.

Can journalism be avant-garde? This question arises from the body of work produced by the New Journalists, whose leading figures include Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer. Today, this question is urgent for considerations of the journalist's role within a political landscape increasingly hostile to the news media. Yet it is a question that has not been sufficiently explored in the field of literary study. Scholars of literary journalism have identified the features of an experimental journalism, traced its historical origins, and made claims about how to situate the New Journalism generically. While important, this scholarship overlooks the relationship between experimentation with conventional journalistic form and similar experimentations in other artistic fields. As a result, the stakes of the New Journalism's experimentations with conventional reporting have not been sufficiently mined. In order to remedy this, I place the New Journalism within a broader history of avant-garde art. The agitation of mainstream journalistic practice undertaken by each of the writers above was spurred by a questioning of a foundational journalistic practice: objectivity. The New Journalists challenged the authority of fact and its capacity to represent the human condition. This challenge to objectivity drove an experimentation with journalistic form that produced a deeply innovative body of work; however, these innovations are not merely formal. They also call into question the epistemological assumptions that tether journalism to a phenomenal world assumed to be fully representable. Significantly, the challenges to objectivity posed by the New Journalists parallel the challenges to representation posed by avant-garde artists like Paul Cezanne and Karel Appel. My dissertation thus situates the challenges to journalistic form undertaken by the New Journalists within a broader history of artistic experimentation and demonstrates that the significance of these experimentations exceeds the fields in which they occur. These arguments provide a framework for understanding not only the formal innovations of avant-garde artists, but also the epistemological consequences, and ethical imperatives, inherent in these innovations. My understanding of avant-garde art is informed by the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard. Over the course of his career, Lyotard illuminated the philosophical dimensions of artistic innovation. For Lyotard, one of the hallmarks of avant-garde experimentation is its ability to confront and redress problems across a variety of discursive fields. That is, Lyotard values avant-garde experimentation because it responds to discourses beyond its own, and much of Lyotard's writing about avant-garde art establishes connections between artistic innovation and broader issues of ethics, politics, and justice. Over the course of this dissertation, I demonstrate how the New Journalism participates in this tradition by asking questions about the role and responsibility of the reporter through the self-conscious development of an experimental journalistic aesthetic.

The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America examines the canonical Latin American avant-garde texts of the 1920s and 1930s in novels, travel writing, journalism, and poetry, and presents them in a new light as formulators of modern Western culture and precursors of global culture. Particular focus is placed on the work of Roberto Arlt and Mario de Andrade as exemplars of the movement. Fernando J. Rosenberg provides a theoretical historiography of Latin American literature and the role that modernity and avant-gardism played in it. He finds significant parallels between the cultural battles of the interwar years in Latin America and current debates over the role of the peripheral nation-state within the culture of globalization. Rosenberg establishes that the Latin American avant-garde evolved on its own terms, in polemic dialogue with the European movements, critiquing modernity itself and developing a global geopolitical awareness. In the process these writers created a bridge between postcolonial and postmodern culture, forming a distinct movement that continues its influence today.

In postrevolutionary Russia, as the Soviet government was initiating a program of rapid industrialization, avant-garde artists declared their intent to serve the nascent state and to transform life in accordance with their aesthetic designs. In spite of their professed utilitarianism, however, most avant-gardists created works that can hardly be regarded as practical instruments of societal transformation. Exploring this paradox, Vaingurt claims that the artists’ investment of technology with aesthetics prevented their creations from being fully conscripted into the arsenal of political hegemony. The purposes of avant-garde technologies, she contends, are contemplative rather than constructive. Looking at Meyerhold’s theater, Tatlin’s and Khlebnikov’s architectural designs, Mayakovsky’s writings, and other works from the period, Vaingurt offers an innovative reading of an exceptionally complex moment in the formation of Soviet culture.