Theorizing the avant-garde : modernism, expressionism, and the problem of postmodernity

Cover......Page 1
Half-title......Page 3
Series-title......Page 6
Title......Page 7
Copyright......Page 8
Contents......Page 9
Introduction......Page 11
Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde: ideology-critique, affirmative culture and the institution of art......Page 15
Benjamin, Lukacs and Bloch: the \"expressionism debates\" and the problem of montage......Page 22
The avant-garde vs. affirmative culture: the aesthetic construction of subjectivity......Page 26
Montage and the epic form: Brecht and Döblin......Page 30
The avant-garde poetics of negation and meaninglessness......Page 33
Aesthetic autonomy in modernism and the avant-garde......Page 36
\"De-aestheticized autonomous art\"......Page 41
From the sublime to the historical avant-garde: the cynical sublation of art and life......Page 43
The \"Romantic avant-garde\" and the \"Aktivisten\"......Page 45
Prospectus. The reaction against realism: counter-discourse and the avant-garde......Page 53
2 Re-writing the discursive world: revolution and the expressionist avant-garde......Page 59
Dominant social discourse: the prison-house of language......Page 61
Epistemological skepticism......Page 64
The expressionist avant-garde: the cynical sublation of art and life......Page 66
Forms of counter-discourse: the avant-garde poetics of representation as re-writing......Page 73
Functional and stylistic transformations......Page 79
Döblin and the avant-garde poetics of expressionist prose......Page 84
Expressionist montage, \"counter-discourse\" and the model of the classic realist text......Page 86
Döblin’s poetics and the avant-garde: the \"naive\" vs. the \"sophisticated\" expressionists......Page 93
Abstraction and the \"aesthetics of the impersonal\"......Page 99
Fredric Jameson’s \"ideology of modernism\" and the expressionist avant-garde......Page 101
Dominant social discourse and \"hegemony\" (Williams)......Page 108
Modernism, order and myth: Benn and the expressionist avant-garde......Page 110
Bad Faith: rationality and the social imaginary......Page 118
Bakhtin and double-voiced discourse: Döblin’s \"The Murder of a Buttercup\" and the double bind......Page 124
Mimesis vs. diegesis: counter-discourse and the classic realist text......Page 125
Cinematic prose: \"Kinostil\"......Page 128
Bakhtin: \"Hybrid\" discourse......Page 131
Irrational authority and the bourgeois imaginary: narration as counter-discourse and critique of ideology......Page 136
Dominant social discourse and the double bind......Page 140
The critique of modernity and dominant social discourse: the \"critique of civilization\" and the counter-text......Page 144
Expressionist poetics and Brecht: anti-illusionism, the \"epic\" and the decentered reader......Page 147
Melodrama as counter-discourse......Page 152
\"The melodramatic imagination\": revolution, the family drama, and its social consequences......Page 156
Desacralization, hysteria and the \"body of the text\"......Page 160
Melodramatic counter-discourse: desublimation, abstraction and the rhetoric of revolution......Page 167
Semiotic overloading and the semantic vacuum: voicelessness, symbolic gesture, tableau......Page 176
Conclusion. Melodrama, abstraction and the avant-garde......Page 185
Semiotic excess, semantic vacuity......Page 190
Todorov: fantasy as realism\'s uncanny other......Page 197
Metamorphosis and transgression......Page 199
Bakhtin: The Metamorphosis as a dialogical or \"hybrid text\"......Page 203
Conclusion. Semiotic excess, semantic vacuity: the fantastic as counter-discourse......Page 207
Carnival desire: representation and discourse......Page 212
The indecidable and the uncanny: Caligari......Page 214
Indecidability: sleep and the displacement of desire......Page 218
The grotesque as counter-discourse: desublimation and the avant-garde......Page 220
The interaction between realism and the fantastic: Cesare and semantic vacuity......Page 223
Representational instability......Page 227
Expressionist poetics and Caligari: the visionary, the supplementary and Kant’s \"aesthetic idea\"......Page 230
Visual displeasure: instability and the spectator......Page 237
Colin MacCabe’s model of \"dominant discourse\" and the \"classic realist text\"......Page 240
Strategies of subversion: Caligari and expressionist counter-discourse......Page 246
Caligari and counter-discourse......Page 253
Conclusion. Expressionism and Weimar silent film: forms of oppositional discourse......Page 256
Towards a poetics of postmodernism: simulation, parody, and history......Page 261
Historicizing the avant-garde: the institution of art and the social imaginary......Page 268
Postmodernism and the historical avant-garde: postmodern parody and expressionist re-writing......Page 272
The historical avant-garde and Baudrillard’s postmodern \"age of simulation\"......Page 277
Expressionist counter-discourse: re-writing and parody......Page 281
Lyotard’s postmodern sublime and Habermas’ \"Enlightenment project of modernity\": modernism, mass culture and the avant-garde......Page 283
Revisiting Lyotard’s answer to the question, \"What is the postmodern?\": the sublime as the unrepresentable condition of art......Page 289
Desublimation and the sublime: the idealist and the cynical avant-garde......Page 295
Modernity and postmodernity: the counter-discourses of the avant-garde and Habermas’ \"incomplete project\" of emancipation......Page 298
Bibliography......Page 310
Index......Page 324