Avant-Garde Neo-Avant-Garde (Avant-Garde Critic...

Avant-gardism has been most prominent in literature and the arts, whereas its use in the context of architecture was less common. Nevertheless, there has been a tendency to identify the Modern movement as the avant-garde in architecture. The theoretical finetuning urged by Burger, however, necessitates a modification of this too-simple identification. BÃrger's work also brought about a growing consensus to distinguish between the historical avant-garde, chronologically situated before World War II, and the neo-avant-garde, which is a more recent phenomenon. The issues and themes around which the Modern movement in architecture crystallized were surely related to the avant-garde logic of destruction of the old and construction of the new. The Modern movement was based on a rejection of the bourgeois culture of philistinism that used pretentious ornament and kitsch and that took the form of eclecticism (Gusevich, 1987). In its stead, the movement gave precedence to purity and authenticity. In the 1920s, these themes acquired a distinct political dimension: The new architecture became associated with the desire for a more socially balanced and egalitarian form of society in which the ideals of equal rights and emancipation would be realized. The architectural vanguard, nevertheless, did not become as uncompromising and as radical as its counterpart in art and literature. Most architects, for example, never renounced the principle of rationality, even if it stood for a bourgeois value. Therefore, it might be more productive not to speak of the Modern movement as the avant-garde but, rather, to distinguish certain avant-garde moments within its discourse, for the movement was hardly a unified whole; rather, it consisted of widely differing trends and tendencies.

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(1) the institution of art is grasped as such not with the historical avant-garde but with the neo-avant-garde; (2) the neo-avant-garde at its best addresses this institution with a creative analysis at once specific and deconstructive (not a nihilistic attack at once abstract and anarchistic, as often with the historical avant-garde); and (3) rather than cancel the historical avant-garde, the neo-avant-garde enacts its project for the first time-a first time that, again, is theoretically endless. (Foster 1996: 20)

Four parameters are relevant for any literary work to be considered as neo-avant-garde. Firstly, special attention will be given to texts in which artists deal with their own poetics and aesthetics vis Ã vis the historical avant-garde as a source of inspiration, or frustration. Indeed, in the wake of the avant-garde, the neo-avant-garde often attacks the dominant aesthetics that celebrates uniqueness and creativity, and pursues mimetic representation. A certain degree of radicalism is thus involved in the claims of the neo-avant-garde, but we can hypothesize that it includes radical forms (e.g., abstract expressionism, neo-dadaism) as well as less radical forms (e.g., lyrical abstraction) and that these forms are sometimes combined.

A third indication that might prompt one to study a given text from the perspective of the neo-avant-garde, is to be found in its paratext, its intertext, its intergenericity and/ or its intermediality. Mottos, quotations, and pictures embedded in the literary text may point directly or indirectly to the historical avant-garde. Neo-avant-garde artists incorporated or imitated characters, words and (fragments of) texts as had already been done by Kurt Schwitters and others. Books and catalogues may even result from a close collaboration between a writer and an artist or may be the product of a double talent of the author/artist. In visual poetry, the text tends to become a work of art (see the poems of Augusto de Campos). In sound poetry (e.g. Henri Chopin), it becomes sonic art.

In short, the historical avant-garde attackedthe autonomy of the art object andits institutionalization and conflated the categories of art and life. BÃrger argued that the "neo-avant-garde"appropriated tactics of the historical avant-garde but in an emaciated form, nolonger challenging the autonomy of art but actively reinforcing it in a depoliticizedand opportunistic way.[20] In this sense, the neo-avant-garde had adoptedthe techniques of the historical avant-garde but without the requisite critiqueof the institution of art and the social structures that created and fuelledit.

Clearly, certain practices are capable ofgreater subversion than others, and representation, for architecture, enablesthe greatest possible field of influence in the contemporary context. The positions of both Tafuri and BÃrgerrepresent the failures of the neo-avant-garde in absolutist terms and neglectthe important media transformations that the formative practices of theneo-avant-garde in architecture have initiated, in addition to the role theymay play in establishing models for future opposition or subterfuge. Through the disruption of "function" and theemergence of "dysfunction" as a spatial strategy aligned to contemporaryreality, the critical legacy of both Tafuri and BÃrger can be assimilated withthe next stage of avant-garde provocation.

This is a very well written and researched book. Considering the theoretical complexity of certain sections of the book, each chapter without exception is highly readable, interesting, and enlightening. There are two parts: Part 1, Concepts, Genres and Techniques this has 10 chapters each written by scholars with in-depth knowledge of post-war neo-avant-garde history, focusing on conceptual issues, matters of genre, and technique. Part Two, Movements and Authors has 11 chapters looking a little more at individual authors and the movements they belonged to, as an example Chapter 12, The Neo-Avant-Garde in Latin America: The Case of Mario Bellatin.

This writing of the unconscious, this pressing of the repressed, was the model for LacanÊs famous phrase Êthe unconscious is structured like a languageÊ. But it also has afïnities with the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, because the Wunderblock enables us not only to discover the writing of the unconscious but also to make explicit repressed meanings in the writing. The Wunderblock is a means of representation, a representation of the unconscious and the repressed, that corresponds to DerridaÊs idea that we have to deconstruct writing in order to gather hidden meanings that are deeper than the evident meaning of a text. Both Freud and Derrida look at the text as a pure trace. The concept of the text as a trace, and the trace Re-presentation of the repressed The political revolution of the neo-avant-garde

Besides the Wunderblock, psychoanalytic theory offers other mechanisms of representation of the repressed to help us construct an aesthetics of symptoms. Among them are the highly effective defence mechanisms of sublimation, displacement and reaction formation. Reaction formation is one of the most powerful concepts for understanding the text of the neo-avant-garde.

Bringing together an international and diverse group of scholars, Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde offers the first in-depth study of the radio medium's significance as a site of artistic experimentation for the literary neo-avant-garde in the postwar period. Covering radio works from the 1950s until the 2010s, the collection charts how artists across the UK, Europe and North America continued as well as reacted to the legacies of the historical avant-garde and modernism, operating within different national broadcasting contexts, by placing radio in an intermedial dialogue with prose, poetry, theatre, music and film. In doing so, the volume explores a wide variety of acoustic genres - radio play, feature, electroacoustic music, radiophonic poem, radio opera - to show that the medium deserves to occupy a more central place than it currently does in studies of literature, (inter)media(lity) and the (neo-)avant-garde.

Part I: The poetics of the radiophonic neo-avant-garde

1 Transnational, untranslatable: Apollinaire in Freddy de Vree's multilingual radiophonic composition A Pollen in the Air - Lars Bernaerts

2 Radiophonic art and electroacoustic music: an aesthetic controversy during the establishment of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the radiophonic poem Private Dreams and Public Nightmares - Tatiana Eichenberger

3 A forefront in the aftermath? Recorded sound and the state of audio play on post-'golden age' US network radio - Harry Heuser

4 Croaks and calls: posthuman sound ecologies in the neo-avant-garde - Jesper Olsson

5 Textual and audiophonic collage in Dutch and Flemish radio plays - Siebe Bluijs

6 'Ja, ja, so schÃn klingt das Schreckliche': an audionarratological analysis of Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit's Lost & Found: Das ParadiesÂ - Jarmila Mildorf

Part II: The acoustic neo-avant-garde between theatre, music and poetry

7 Poetry on the Austrian radio: sound, voice and intermediality - Daniel Gilfillan

8 Gerhard RÃhm's radiophonic poetry - Roland Innerhofer

9 A theatre of choric voices: Jandl and MayrÃcker's radio play Spaltungen - Inge Arteel

10 Language, sound and textuality: Caryl Churchill's Identical Twins as neo-avant-garde (radio) drama - Pim Verhulst

11 Studio audience: Glenn Gould's contrapuntal radio - Adam J. Frank

Index

Despite her active involvement in several of the Gruppo 63\u2019s meetings and activities over the years, Carla Vasio (b. 1923) is rarely mentioned in critical discussions of the Italian neo-avant-garde, and very little attention has been devoted to her work. This is not an isolated oversight, but a part of a larger pattern of marginalizing women writers. Our reading of two of Vasio\u2019s most interesting and innovative novels\u2014L\u2019orizzonte (1966) and La pi\u00F9 grande anamorfosi del mondo (2009)\u2013shows that this marginalization is unjustified, and that she is a writer who actively contributed to the aesthetic innovation of the Gruppo 63 while creating her own experimental narrative style. Vasio\u2019s literary experimentation is an example of neo-avant-garde aesthetics, distinguished by its sophisticated feminist critique of both the dominant masculinist dynamic of the Gruppo 63 and the misogyny of postwar Italian culture and society.

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