Philosophies of confrontation: Aesthetic and political vanguardism, 1917--1956.
Item
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Title
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Philosophies of confrontation: Aesthetic and political vanguardism, 1917--1956.
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Identifier
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AAI3278413
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identifier
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3278413
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Creator
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Maerhofer, John W.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Mary Ann Caws
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, American | Art History | Literature, Caribbean
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the theoretical structure of aesthetic and political vanguardism that materialized in the first half of the twentieth century, from 1917-1956. Focusing mostly on poetry and poetics, the objective of the thesis is to trace the historical development of aesthetic and political vanguardism, beginning with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and the ways in which that event resounded in the European avant-garde movements, particularly in post-revolutionary Russian Futurism, in German Dadaism of the Weimar Republic, and in French Surrealism under the leadership of Andre Breton. The beginning chapters will focus on the politicization of aesthetic production, as much as it will attempt to assess Marxist and non-Marxist theoretical perspectives of the historical avant-garde, emphasizing the relationship between aesthetics, ideology, and revolutionary praxis. The interconnection between Marxist politics and the aesthetic response, as such, is intended to accentuate the extent to which "revolution" became a dominating signifier of avant-garde cultural production, as the standardized "manifesto" of many of these movements illustrates, and thus established a paradigm which the historical avant-garde was obliged to follow. Chapter three focuses on the "right" and "left" dialectical configurations of vanguardism, particularly Ezra Pound's engagement with Futurist cultural politics under Fascism, and Louis Zukofsky's assimilation of Cubism and Russian Constructivism, a dialectical analysis that is meant to expand the theoretical structures offered in the first two chapters. In chapter four, the aesthetics and politics of Aime Cesaire are considered in relation to the crisis of European vanguardism that occurred as it resounded in the Caribbean, especially in Martinique where aesthetics and politics merged in the "oppositional praxis" of decolonization. The work of Zukofsky and Cesaire represents the constructive response toward European aesthetic and political vanguardism as it traveled across the Atlantic, yet it is also through their work that it is possible to observe the ways in which the apparatus of vanguardism began to be deconstructed, an interpretation that is considered in the final chapter of the dissertation in relation to what can be called the late capitalist subsumption of historical vanguardism in the post-World War II era.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
