"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

This book offers the first in-depth look at avant-garde theatre in the United States from the early 1950s to the 1990s looking at its origins and its theoretical foundations through an examination of literature, cinema and art.

Avant-garde art between 1910 and 1950 is well known for its use of "primitive" imagery, often borrowed from traditional cultures in Africa and Oceania. Less recognized, however, is the use United States artists made of Native American art, myth, and ritual to craft a specifically American Modernist art. In this groundbreaking study, W. Jackson Rushing comprehensively explores the process by which Native American iconography was appropriated, transformed, and embodied in American avant-garde art of the Modernist period. Writing from the dual perspectives of cultural and art history, Rushing shows how national exhibitions of Native American art influenced such artists, critics, and patrons as Marsden Hartley, John Sloan, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Robert Henri, John Marin, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and especially Jackson Pollock, whose legendary drip paintings he convincingly links with the curative sand paintings of the Navajo. He traces the avant-garde adoption of Native American cultural forms to anxiety over industrialism and urbanism, post-World War I "return to roots" nationalism, the New Deal search for American strengths and values, and the notion of the "dark" Jungian unconscious current in the 1940s. Through its interdisciplinary approach, this book underscores the fact that even abstract art springs from specific cultural and political motivations and sources. Its message is especially timely, for Euro-American society is once again turning to Native American cultures for lessons on how to integrate our lives with the land, with tradition, and with the sacred.

Regarded as one of the founders of the postwar American independent cinema, Maya Deren was a poet, photographer, ethnographer and filmaker. These essays examine Deren's writings, films, and legacy from a variety of perspectives.

A landmark work of cultural history that tells the story of how four young poets, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, reinvented literature and turned New York into the art capital of the world. Greenwich Village, New York, circa 1951. Every night, at a rundown tavern with a magnificent bar called the Cedar Tavern, an extraordinary group or painters, writers, poets, and hangers-on arrive to drink, argue, tell jokes, fight, start affairs, and bang out a powerful new aesthetic. Their style is playful, irreverent, tradition-shattering, and brilliant. Out of these friendships, and these conversations, will come the works of art and poetry that will define New York City as the capital of world culture--abstract expressionism and the New York School of Poetry. A richly detailed portrait of one of the great movements in American arts and letters, The Last Avant-Garde covers the years 1948-1966 and focuses on four fast friends--the poets Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Lehman brings to vivid life the extraordinary creative ferment of the time and place, the relationship of great friendship to art, and the powerful influence that a group of visual artisits--especially Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter--had on the literary efforts of the New York School. The Last Avant-Garde is both a definitive and lively view of a quintessentially American aesthetic and an exploration of the dynamics of creativity.

Surveying the Avant-Garde examines the art and literature of the Americas in the early twentieth century through the lens of the questionnaire, a genre as central as the manifesto to the history of the avant-garde. Questions such as “How do you imagine Latin America?” and “What should American art be?” issued by avant-garde magazines like Imán, a Latin American periodical based in Paris, and Cuba’s Revista de Avance demonstrate how editors, writers, and readers all grappled with the concept of “America,” particularly in relationship to Europe, and how the questionnaire became a structuring device for reflecting on their national and aesthetic identities in print. Through an analysis of these questionnaires and their responses, Lori Cole reveals how ideas like “American art,” as well as “modernism” and “avant-garde,” were debated at the very moment of their development and consolidation. Unlike a manifesto, whose signatories align with a single polemical text, the questionnaire produces a patchwork of responses, providing a composite and sometimes fractured portrait of a community. Such responses yield a self-reflexive history of the era as told by its protagonists, which include figures such as Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Jean Toomer, F. T. Marinetti, Diego Rivera, and Jorge Luis Borges. The book traces a genealogy of the genre from the Renaissance paragone, or “comparison of the arts,” through the rise of enquêtes in the late nineteenth century, up to the contemporary questionnaire, which proliferates in art magazines today. By analyzing a selection of surveys issued across the Atlantic, Cole indicates how they helped shape artists’ and writers’ understanding of themselves and their place in the world. Based on extensive archival research, this book reorients our understanding of modernism as both hemispheric and transatlantic by narrating how the artists and writers of the period engaged in aesthetic debates that informed and propelled print communities in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Scholars of modernism and the avant-garde will welcome Cole’s original and compellingly crafted work.

In the twentieth century, avant-garde artists from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean created extraordinary and highly innovative paintings, sculptures, assemblages, mixed-media works, and installations. This innovative book presents more than 250 works by some seventy of these artists (including Gego, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Xul Solar, and Jose Clemente Orozco) and artists' groups, along with interpretive essays by leading authorities and newly translated manifestoes and other theoretical documents written by the artists. Together the images and texts showcase the astonishing artistic achievements of the Latin American avant-garde. The book focuses on two decisive periods: the return from Europe in the 1920s of Latin American avant-garde pioneers; and the expansion of avant-garde activities throughout Latin America after World War II as artists expressed their independence from developments in Europe and the United States. As the authors explain, during these periods Latin American art was fueled by the belief that artistic creations could present a form of utopia - an inversion of the original premise that drove the European avant-garde - and serve as a model for

Discusses the social aspects of art, popular culture as art, galleries, museums, and the meaning of art.

Arthur (English and film studies, Montclair State U.) balances close analysis of major and lesser-known films with detailed examinations of their production, distribution and exhibition. He addresses the avant-garde's cultural significance and reexamines accepted critical categories and artistic options. Rather than treating American avant-garde ci

Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.