One of the most controversial and ironic of twentieth-century modernisms, Dada swept through the arts after the shock of World War I, when poets, painters, filmmakers, and performers joined forces to challenge conventions of society and art. The only collection of its kind, this volume includes writings by leading Dadaists: Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Richard Huelsenbeck, Roger Vitrac, Tristan Tzara, Emmy Hennings, Francis Picabia, and others.

Edited by Leah Dickerman. Essays by Brigid Doherty, Sabine T. Kriebel, Dorothea Dietrich, Michael R. Taylor, Janine Mileaf and Matthew S. Witkovsky. Foreword by Earl A. Powell III.

How Dada is to break its cultural accommodation and containment today necessitates thinking the historical instances through revised application of critical and theoretical models. The volume Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde moves precisely by this motive, bringing together writings which insist upon the continuity of the early twentieth-century moment now at the start of the twenty-first. Engaging the complex and contradictory nature of Dada strategies, instanced in the linguistic gaming and performativity of the movement's initial formation, and subsequently isolating the specific from the general with essays focusing on Ball, Tzara, Serner, Hausmann, Dix, Heartfield, Schwitters, Baader, Cravan and the exemplary Duchamp, the political philosophy of the avant-garde is brought to bear upon our own contemporary struggle through critical theory to comprehend the cultural usefulness, relevance, validity and effective (or otherwise) oppositionality of Dada's infamous anti-stance. The volume is presented in sections that progressively point towards the expanding complexity of the contemporary engagement with Dada, as what is often exhaustive historical data is forced to rethink, realign and reconfigure itself in response to the analytical rigour and exercise of later twentieth-century animal anarchic thought, the testing and cultural placement of thoughts upon the virtual, and the eventual implications for the once blissfully unproblematic idea of expression. From the opening, provocative proposition that historically Dada may have been the falsest of all false paths, the volume rounds to dispute such condemnation as demarcation continues not only of Dada's embeddedness in western culture, but more precisely of the location of Dada culture. Ten critical essays - by Cornelius Partsch, John Wall, T. J. Demos, Anna Schaffner, Martin I. Gaughan, Curt Germundson, Stephen C. Foster, Dafydd Jones, Joel Freeman and David Cunningham - are supplemented by the critical bibliography prepared by Timothy Shipe, which documents the past decade of Dada scholarship, and in so doing provides a valuable resource for all those engaged in Dada studies today.

"A key document. . . . Indispensable for an understanding of the beginnings of the Dada movement and Dada in Zurich."—Rudolf Kuenzli, Director, International Dada Archive "In Flight Out of Time one can follow Dada's unfolding and expansion almost day-by-day."—Charles Haxthausen, coeditor, Berlin: Culture and Metropolis

The Music of Dada provides a historical analysis of music at Dada events, and asks why accounts of Dada have so consistently ignored music's vital presence, explaining how music has related to the other arts ever since the days of Dada. The music of Dada is the key to understanding intermediality in our time.

A stimulating introduction to the many debates surrounding the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, such as the Marquis de Sade's position as a Surrealist deity, attitudes towards the city, the impact of Freud, and attitudes towards women.

This volume collects together the Dada writings of Theo van Doesburg, the celebrated De Stijl architect. Apart from the title lecture these texts appeared under the pseudonym of I.K. Bonset and were generally published in Van Doesburg's magazine Mecano (four issues 1922-23). Also included is his novel The Other Sight.Michael White's introduction describes the Dada tour of Holland undertaken by Van Doesburg and his friends at the beginning of 1923."

his book is the first to make the case that women's changing role in European and American society was critical to Dada.