AVANT-GARDE!

Students in "Writing about Modern Literature" are concurrently studying the historical avant-garde in Art History III. The parallelism is not a coincidence; this was a period in European (and North American) history where the "literary" field directly overlapped with the "visual art" field. Writers and artists saw their cultural work as more alike than different. The Tate Museum in England has a good webpage about several of the more well-known avant-garde movements in the first third of the 20th century.

For Wednesday's class, we're going to focus on three of the major avant-garde movements: Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. All three of these movements were revolutionary: They wanted to overthrow standard and conventional ideas about art production and consumption. They wrote manifestos in support of their radical ideas.
Page numbers are from the Norton Anthology of World Literature, 3rd ed. Volume F. Three copies of this book are available on reserve in the DCAD library. 

These readings are very short. Please be sure you have read them carefully before class on Wednesday.

F.T. Marinetti, "The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909), 642.

Tristan Tzara, "Dada Manifesto, excerpt" (1918), 652.

Andre Breton, "Manifesto of Surrealism, excerpt" (1924), 653.

Questions? Send me an email message at csmith@dcad.edu