Tzara - who himself coined the term "Dada," inspired by an obscure connection of his birthday to an Orthodox saint - was at the Cabaret Voltaire that night, along with fellow Romanians Marcel, Jules, and Georges Janco and Arthur Segal. It's not a coincidence, Sandqvist argues, that so many of the first dadaist group was Romanians. Sandqvist traces the artistic and personal transformations that took place in the "little Paris of the Balkans" before they took center stage elsewhere, finding sources as varied as symbolism, futurism, and folklore. He points to a connection between Romanian modernists and the Eastern European Yiddish tradition; Tzara, the Janco brothers, and Segal all grew up within Jewish culture and traditions.".

In Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media, Claudia Costa Pederson analyzes modernist avant-garde and contemporary video games to challenge the idea that gaming is an exclusively white, heterosexual, male, corporatized leisure activity and reenvisions it as a catalyst for social change. By looking at over fifty projects that together span a century and the world, Pederson explores the capacity for sociopolitical commentary in virtual and digital realms and highlights contributions to the history of gaming by women, queer, and transnational artists. The result is a critical tool for understanding video games as imaginative forms of living that offer alternatives to our current reality. With an interdisciplinary approach, Gaming Utopia emphasizes how game design, creation, and play can become political forms of social protest and examines the ways that games as art open doors to a more just and peaceful world.

The first volume of the new series “European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies” focuses on the relation between the avant-garde, modernism and Europe. It combines interdisciplinary and intermedial research on experimental aesthetics and poetics. The essays, written by experts from more than fifteen countries, seek to bring out the complexity of the European avant-garde and modernism by relating it to Europe’s intricate history, multiculturalism and multilingualism. They aim to inquire into the divergent cultural views on Europe taking shape in avant-garde and modernist practices and to chart a composite image of the “other Europe(s)” that have emerged from the (contemporary) avant-garde and experimental modernism. How did the avant-garde and modernism in (and outside) Europe give shape to local, national and pan-European forms of identity and community? To what extent does the transnational exchange and cross-fertilisation of aesthetic tendencies illustrate the well-rehearsed claim that the avant-gardes form a typically European phenomenon? Dealing with canonised as well as lesser known exponents of modernism and the avant-garde throughout Europe, this book will appeal to all those interested in European cultural, literary and art history.

Dada magazines made Dada what it was: diverse, non-hierarchical, transnational, and defiant of the most fundamental artistic conventions. This first volume entirely devoted to Dada periodicals retells the story of Dada by demonstrating the centrality of these graphically inventive, provocative periodicals: Dada, New York Dada, Dada Jok, and dozens more that began crossing enemy lines during World War I. The book includes magazines from well-known Dada cities like New York and Paris as well as Zagreb and Bucharest, and reveals that Dada continued to inspire art journals into the 1920s. Anchored in close material analysis within a historical and theoretical framework, Dada Magazines models a novel, multifaceted methodology for assessing many kinds of periodicals. The book traces how the Dadaists-Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Dragan Aleksic, Hannah Höch, and many others-compiled, printed, distributed, and exchanged these publications. At the same time, it recognizes the journals as active agents that engendered the Dada network, and its thematic, chronological structure captures the constant exchanges that took place in this network. With in-depth scrutiny of these magazines-and 1970s “Dadazines” inspired by them-Dada Magazines is a vital source in the histories of art and design, periodical studies, and modernist studies.

This is the first comprehensive study of bodily images in Dada. Travelling between the international centres of the movement, from Zurich to Berlin, Paris to New York, it examines a diverse range of media, including art, literature, performance, photography and film. Its overall approach is to confront Dada’s bodily images not as organic unities but as fictions that reflect on the disjunctive, dehumanised society of war-torn Europe. These fictions occupy an ambivalent space between the battlefield (in their satirical exposure of ideology) and the fairground (in their playful manipulation and joyful renewal of the body). The book features analyses of works by Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Hannah Höch, Marcel Duchamp and others, and will appeal to scholars and students of European history, cultural history, art and literature.

This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life."—The Posthuman Dada Guide The Posthuman Dada Guide is an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world—all by way of examining the imagined 1916 chess game between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and V. I. Lenin, the daddy of communism. This epic game at Zurich's Café de la Terrasse—a battle between radical visions of art and ideological revolution—lasted for a century and may still be going on, although communism appears dead and Dada stronger than ever. As the poet faces the future mass murderer over the chessboard, neither realizes that they are playing for the world. Taking the match as metaphor for two poles of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought, politics, and life, Andrei Codrescu has created his own brilliantly Dadaesque guide to Dada—and to what it can teach us about surviving our ultraconnected present and future. Here dadaists Duchamp, Ball, and von Freytag-Loringhoven and communists Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev appear live in company with later incarnations, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gilles Deleuze, and Newt Gingrich. The Posthuman Dada Guide is arranged alphabetically for quick reference and (some) nostalgia for order, with entries such as "eros (women)," "internet(s)," and "war." Throughout, it is written in the belief "that posthumans lining the road to the future (which looks as if it exists, after all, even though Dada is against it) need the solace offered by the primal raw energy of Dada and its inhuman sources.

The Dada movement, revered as perhaps the purest form of cultural subversion and provocation in 20th-century Europe, has been a victim of the readiness with which cultural historians have swallowed its own propaganda. Based on extensive close analysis of French-language Dada work in its original form, and offering English translations throughout, this major reappraisal looks at a broad range of media and topics - including poetry, film, philosophy, and quantum physics - in order to get beyond Dada's typecasting as avant-garde anti-hero. Work by women writers and other marginalized figures combines with that of canonical Dadaists to present Dada in a radically new set of guises: poetic and textually subtle; intellectually and philosophically meaningful; peaceable and quasi-Buddhist; and, perhaps most uncomfortably of all, conformist and reactionary.

This excellent overview of new research on Dada and Surrealism blends expert synthesis of the latest scholarship with completely new research, offering historical coverage as well as in-depth discussion of thematic areas ranging from criminality to gender. This book provides an excellent overview of new research on Dada and Surrealism from some of the finest established and up-and-coming scholars in the field Offers historical coverage as well as in–depth discussion of thematic areas ranging from criminality to gender One of the first studies to produce global coverage of the two movements, it also includes a section dealing with the critical and cultural aftermath of Dada and Surrealism in the later twentieth century Dada and Surrealism are arguably the most popular areas of modern art, both in the academic and public spheres

Launches an eight-volume series on the rebellious art form created during World War I by artists and writers in Zurich reacting to the horror of war, the onslaught of new technology, and the stifling aesthetics of futurism and cubism. In 11 essays, provides parameters for the historical and sociological context of the movement; its manifestation in visual arts, theater, the media, and literature; the correspondence between the actual works and the various manifestos; and the relevance of studying the phenomenon to present concerns. Illustrated in black and white. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.