Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde

Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde PDF Author: Julia Vaingurt
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810166526
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde

Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde PDF Author: Julia Vaingurt
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810166526
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde

The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde PDF Author: Irina Sirotkina
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135001432X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
The touch and movement senses have a large place in the modern arts. This is widely discussed and celebrated, often enough as if it represents a breakthrough in a primarily visual age. This book turns to history to show just how significant movement and the sense of movement were to pioneers of modernism at the turn of the 20th century. It makes this history vivid through a picture of movement in the lives of an extraordinary generation of Russian artists, writers, theatre people and dancers bridging the last years of the tsars and the Revolution. Readers will gain a new perspective on the relation between art and life in the period 1890-1920 in great innovators like the poets Mayakovsky and Andrei Bely, the theatre director Meyerhold, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the young men and women in Russia inspired by her lead, and esoteric figures like Gurdjieff. Movement, and the turn to the body as a source of natural knowledge, was at the centre of idealistic creativity and hopes for a new age, for a 'new man', and this was true both for those who looked forward to the technology of the future and those who looked back to the harmony of Ancient Greece. The book weaves history and analysis into a colourful, thoughtful affirmation of movement in the expressive life.

Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory

Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory PDF Author: Jed Rasula
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192570722
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 479

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is a book about artistic modernism contending with the historical transfigurations of modernity. As a conscientious engagement with modernity's restructuring of the lifeworld, the modernist avant-garde raised the stakes of this engagement to programmatic explicitness. But even beyond the vanguard, the global phenomenon of jazz combined somatic assault with sensory tutelage. Jazz, like the new technologies of modernity, re-calibrated sensory ratios. The criterion of the new as self-making also extended to names: pseudonyms and heteronyms. The protocols of modernism solicited a pragmatic arousal of bodily sensation as artistic resource, validating an acrobatic sensibility ranging from slapstick and laughter to the pathos of bereavement. Expressivity trumped representation. The artwork was a diagram of perception, not a mimetic rendering. For artists, the historical pressures of altered perception provoked new models, and Ezra Pound's slogan 'Make It New' became the generic rallying cry of renovation. The paradigmatic stance of the avant-garde was established by Futurism, but the discovery of prehistoric art added another provocation to artists. Paleolithic caves validated the spirit of all-over composition, unframed and dynamic. Geometric abstraction, Constructivism and Purism, and Surrealism were all in quest of a new mythology. Making it new yielded a new pathos in the sensation of radical discrepancy between futurist striving and remotest antiquity. The Paleolithic cave and the USSR emitted comparable siren calls on behalf of the remote past and the desired future. As such, the present was suffused with the pathos of being neither, but subject to both.

David Bergelson's Strange New World

David Bergelson's Strange New World PDF Author: Harriet Murav
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253036933
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Get Book Here

Book Description
A contemporary evaluation of Bergelson and his works, examining Yiddish literature, Jewish culture, and modernism. David Bergelson (1884–1952) emerged as a major literary figure who wrote in Yiddish before WWI. He was one of the founders of the Kiev Kultur-Lige, and his work was at the center of the Yiddish-speaking world of the time. He was well known for creating characters who often felt the painful after-effects of the past and the clumsiness of bodies stumbling through the actions of daily life as their familiar worlds crumbled around them. In this contemporary assessment of Bergelson and his fiction, Harriet Murav focuses on untimeliness, anachronism, and warped temporality as an emotional, sensory, existential, and historical background to Bergleson’s work and world. Murav grapples with the great modern theorists of time and memory, especially Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin, to present Bergelson as an integral part of the philosophical and artistic experiments, political and technological changes, and cultural context of Russian and Yiddish modernism that marked his age. As a comparative and interdisciplinary study of Yiddish literature and Jewish culture, this work adds a new, ethnic dimension to understandings of the turbulent birth of modernism. “Harriet Murav treats Bergelson with the care and sincerity that literary critics have shown other important writers. This is a masterpiece of literary scholarship that will be sure to transform not only how people read Bergelson and who chooses to read Bergelson, but how readers engage with the entire concept of modernism itself.” —David Shneer, author of Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture: 1918-1930

Alternative Kinships

Alternative Kinships PDF Author: Jacob Emery
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
ISBN: 1501756729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book Here

Book Description
According to Marx, the family is the primal scene of the division of labor and the "germ" of every exploitative practice. In this insightful study, Jacob Emery examines the Soviet Union's programmatic effort to institute a global siblinghood of the proletariat, revealing how alternative kinships motivate different economic relations and make possible other artistic forms. A time in which literary fiction was continuous with the social fictions that organize the social economy, the early Soviet period magnifies the interaction between the literary imagination and the reproduction of labor onto a historical scale. Narratives dating back to the ancient world feature scenes in which a child looks into a mirror and sees someone else reflected there, typically a parent. In such scenes, two definitions of the aesthetic coincide: art as a fantastic space that shows an alternate reality and art as a mirror that reflects the world as it is. In early Soviet literature, mirror scenes illuminate the intersection of imagination and economy, yielding new relations destined to replace biological kinship—relations based in food, language, or spirit. These metaphorical kinships have explanatory force far beyond their context, providing a vantage point onto, for example, the Gothic literature of the early United States and the science fiction discourses of the postwar period. Alternative Kinships will appeal to scholars of Russian literature, comparative literature, and literary theory, as well as those interested in reconciling formalist and materialist approaches to culture.

International History

International History PDF Author: Akira Iriye
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1780936303
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
International History: A Cultural Approach offers an innovative history of modern international relations that stresses cultural themes. In place of the usual focus on great-power rivalries, diplomatic negotiations, military conflict, and other phenomena in which sovereign nations are the key players, this book focuses on intercultural relations as individuals, races, religions, and non-state actors interact across national boundaries, to provide a fresh perspective on modern international history. Among the themes covered are: - Nationalism and cosmopolitanism - Migration - Cross-cultural encounters - Consumerism and youth cultures - Environmental transformations - Economic and technological globalization Akira Iriye and Petra Goedde's approach offers a deeper understanding of international history, focusing on people and their cultures rather than just state level interactions.

Medical Storyworlds

Medical Storyworlds PDF Author: Elena Fratto
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231554508
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Get Book Here

Book Description
Though often seen as scientific or objective, medicine has a fundamentally narrative aspect. Much like how an author constructs meaning around fictional events, a doctor or patient narrates the course of an illness and treatment. In what ways have literary and medical storytelling intersected with and shaped each other? In Medical Storyworlds, Elena Fratto examines the relationship between literature and medicine at the turn of the twentieth century—a period when novelists were experimenting with narrative form and the modern medical establishment was taking shape. She traces how Russian writers such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov responded to contemporary medical and public health prescriptions, placing them in dialogue with French and Italian authors including Romains and Svevo and such texts as treatises by Paul Broca and Cesare Lombroso. In nuanced readings of these works, Fratto reveals how authors and characters question the rhetoric and authority of medicine and public health in telling stories of mortality, illness, and well-being. In so doing, she argues, they provide alternative ways of thinking about the limits and possibilities of human agency and free will. Bridging the medical humanities, European literary studies, and Slavic studies, Medical Storyworlds shows how narrative theory and canonical literary texts offer a new lens on today’s debates in medical ethics and bioethics.

The Artist as Inventor

The Artist as Inventor PDF Author: Valentino Catricalà
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786611333
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Get Book Here

Book Description
Today the media arts not only address the great themes of our times, they inhabit the very media of which they speak. The contemporary is global, but only because of the media that enable globalisation. Those media are almost nowhere apparent in the mainstream practice of art that we see in biennials from Venice to Sao Paolo. The media arts reflect back to us our present condition, and in the archive present us with the ghosts of what we were, and what we failed to become. This book brings the reader into the centre of these strange encounters, introducing us to the rich legacies and futures of the most important arts of the last hundred years. It also looks ahead to the future and asks what happens to the condition of being human within the new constellation into which we are entering?

Building a new New World

Building a new New World PDF Author: Jean-Louis Cohen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300248156
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Get Book Here

Book Description
An essential exploration of how Russian ideas about the United States shaped architecture and urban design from the czarist era to the fall of the U.S.S.R. Idealized representations of America, as both an aspiration and a menace, played an important role in shaping Russian architecture and urban design from the American Revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union. Jean-Louis Cohen traces the powerful concept of “Amerikanizm” and its impact on Russia’s built environment from early czarist interest in Revolutionary America, through the spectacular World’s Fairs of the 19th century, to department stores, skyscrapers, and factories built in Russia using American methods during the 20th century. Visions of America also captivated the Russian avant-garde, from El Lissitzky to Moisei Ginzburg, and Cohen explores the ongoing artistic dialogue maintained between the two countries at the mid-century and in the late Soviet era, following a period of strategic competition. This first major study of Amerikanizm in the architecture of Russia makes a timely contribution to our understanding of modern architecture and its broader geopolitics.

Modernism beyond the Human

Modernism beyond the Human PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004549684
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the defining features of modernism lies in its far-reaching rethinking of the relation between the human and the non-human. In the present volume, this crucial aspect of modernism’s legacy is investigated from an authentically transnational perspective, taking an innovative stance on a diverse range of authors – from posthumanist classics such as Beckett and Woolf to Valentine de Saint-Point, Radoje Domanovic and Aldo Palazzeschi among others. On the one hand, this collection sheds new light on the modernist contribution to posthumanism, providing a valuable reference point for future studies on the topic. On the other, it offers a new take on the transnational dimension of modernism, highlighting unexplored convergences between modernist authors from several different national contexts.