Browsing by Subject "Avant-garde"
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Item Between cosmopolitanism and nationalism : print, national identity, and the literary public sphere in the 1920s Petersburg and Buenos Aires(2010-05) Potoplyak, Marina; Lindstrom, Naomi, 1950-; Garza, Thomas J.; Levine, Madeline G.; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth M.; Shumway, NicolasIn Russia and Argentina modernism arrived well before the advent of socioeconomic modernization, and found societies with restricted civil liberties, only nascent middle classes, and virtually non-existent public spheres. Despite these factors, within a span of some fifty years, Petersburg and Buenos Aires turned into vibrant literary capitals rivaling London, New York, and Paris as centers of literary modernism. This dissertation offers a new understanding of the period by exposing the critical role of publishers and cultural patrons in this extraordinary cultural advancement. I argue that they were able to reformulate their countries’ historically ambivalent positions vis-à-vis Western European civilization by working closely with avant-garde literary groups and viii promoting their literary works that combined sometimes contending, sometimes complementary cosmopolitanism and nationalism. My analysis of the interrelated processes of the development of print culture, national identity, and the literary public sphere in Russia and Argentina is informed by Benedict Anderson’s thinking about nationalism and print culture, Pierre Bourdieu’s treatment of publishers as key participants in cultural production, and the concept of the public sphere as seen by Jürgen Habermas. Close reading of select literary works of the 1920s shows that Russian and Argentine “peripheral” experiences, once transformed into artistic creation, became consonant with cultural practices of international modernism precisely because they combined both cosmopolitan and nationalist tendencies. Each of the writers considered—Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, Veniamin Kaverin, and Konstantin Fedin—was able to formulate highly original and yet unmistakably national response to modernity. Following the writers’ trajectories from early literary experiments to the works of the late 1920s, when they renounced their youthful deviations and joined the literary (and sometimes even political) establishment, I show how these literary texts renegotiated the issues of national identity by reworking diverse and often “foreign” literary traditions into authentically Russian and Argentine prose.Item It's all for naught : avant-garde cinema, regional history, and the South(2015-05) Malin, Sean Lowel; Frick, Caroline; Hutchison, ColemanAt the margins of cinema history are films that defy traditional strategies of production, narrative, and aesthetics. These "experimental" works are the subjects of their own histories concomitant to those in "mainstream" film studies. Media scholarship by the likes of David James and P. Adams Sitney has attempted to implement the avant-garde into wider filmmaking narratives. But histories and critical studies alike widely marginalize experimental works made outside of expected cosmopolitan centers, particularly when fringe films and their makers hail from the American South. This project argues that the near-elimination of the region's avant-gardists from media history prevents works of cultural import from disseminating into the national narrative. Through an interdisciplinary study of local experimental communities, with direct focus on New Orleans, it also contends that recovering these works is essential to more inclusive and thus emancipatory regional media narratives. The thesis concludes with an original taxonomy of archives and interviews for future critical Southern media scholarship.Item Rostros del reverse : José Lezama Lima en la encrucijada vanguardista(2012-05) Robyn, Ingrid; Salgado, César Augusto; Roncador, Sonia; Lindstrom, Naomi; Arroyo-Martínez, Jossianna; Pimentel Pinto, JúlioThis dissertation reassesses the dialogues between the aesthetic and cultural projects of Cuban writer José Lezama Lima (1910-1976) and the avant-garde, in both its European and Latin American manifestations. My main assertion is that Lezama Lima’s negative appraisals of the avant-garde are more a symptom of his will-to-power and self-legitimization than a categorical rejection of avant-garde values. My work thus revises the critical consensus that fixates on Lezama Lima’s presumed rejection of the avant-garde by documenting the deep relationships between texts and contexts, that is to say, between his poiesis and the intellectual, artistic and cultural manifestations that conform the late ‘30s and ‘40s Cuban scenario, to which the pervasiveness of European and Latin American avant-garde movements such as muralismo were fundamental. I hence consider Lezama Lima’s intricate engagement with avant-garde manifestations in the visual arts, an essential element in his aesthetics underestimated by critics despite the centrality of the concept of image to his works, and the attention 20th century art and thought gave to vision and visuality, as shown by critics Martin Jay and Mary Ann Caws. My dissertation thus explores the interconnections between intellectual, literary and visual art history in order to demonstrate how, despite his critical pronouncements against the avant-garde’s will-to-novelty and rejection of tradition, Lezama Lima actually incorporates several avant-garde topoi and techniques into his works (such as André Breton’s concept of “objective chance” and Pablo Picasso’s “completive technique”), in direct response to the epistemological shift they embody – a shift that has deeply impacted the contemporary regime of perception and patterns of representation. By driving Lezama Lima’s works back to its original contexts, my dissertation represents an important contribution to Cuban avant-garde criticism and its relationship to the broader cultural context of the avant-garde in Latin America and Europe, dialoguing with recent theories that emphasize the impact of the avant-garde on the establishment of contemporary regime of perception and patterns of representation as well.