Comments on: Avant-Garde and Modern, Part Four

By: Johannes Goransson

Johannes Goransson — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:09:12 +0000

I’m a little late to post on this thread and I’m also a little wary since it seems Reginald’s main aim seems not to be to understand the notion of “avant-garde” but to anxiously try to bury the notion (this is not strange since it is fundamentally opposed to his hierarchical ideal of poetry as a chess game for masters).
However, I’ll make a few brief notes for people who are perhaps interested in this issue:
1) Hal Foster offers some interesting takes on Burger – and answers a lot of Reginald’s critiques – in his book “Return of the Real.”
2) Burger changed his own mind about the “neo-avant-garde” later in his career.
3) The best history of the concept of “avant-garde” (going back to Romanticism) is Calinescu’s “Five Face of Modernism.” He also offers a lot of the cliche critiques of the concept (which Reginald also uses).
4) Reginald is correct in that a significant part of avant-garde (or, more so, the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s) are indeed opposed to “pleasure.” But other parts of it are not. Of course what is meant by “pleasure” vary – my idea of it will likely be diametrically opposed to Reginald’s.
Best,
Johannes

By: Brent Cunningham

Brent Cunningham — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:59:47 +0000

I realize this thread is rather dead by now, and in the way of blogs rapidly sinking off into the cryogentic freeze of an infinity of online archives, but before it winks away utterly I wanted to mention & link to CA Conrad’s new Fanzine. His intro seems deeply relevant to the topic we’ve been discussing, and it’s not only evidence that I’m not the only one who hears the term “avant garde” in the way I’m describing but also evidence that Burger himself (in that Michael Hennessey quote) can be read and used very differently from the death-of-the-avant-garde interpretation that’s been presumed here:
http://thefanzine.com/articles/poetry/254/phillysound_poets/1
yrs,
Brent

By: Brian Salchert

Brian Salchert — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:08:44 +0000

For years I have had a copy of the Doubleday Anchor Book version of
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. On page 295, this:
“But there are other more serious danger signs that man
may be willing and, indeed, is on the point of developing
into that animal species from which, since Darwin, he im-
agines he has come.”

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:08:42 +0000

Well thanks! I just spent a half-hour browsing The Human Condition! [Winky emoticon -- I can't bring myself to actually use emoticons, but they turn out to be useful. So I'm pioneering the use of Irony-Free Meta-Emoticons. I expect to make a bundle from Facebook.] Haven't read the Intro to the Schoken Illuminations, in moons, but it seems I should. (It's about the only worthwhile thing left there after Harvard upped the ante -- & the price tag.) From The Human Condition: "The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or a 'character' in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us."

By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:57:48 +0000

I don’t subscribe to this din, but I do find the fact that it is out there totally insane and interesting.
The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative
By Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson
with forewords by E. O. Wilson and Frederick Crews
The book was rejected, perhaps rightfully so, by numerous publishers and finally picked up by Northwestern University Press. Published 2005.
The jacket copy reads:
In recent years, articles in major periodicals from the New York Times Magazine to the Times Literary Supplement have heralded the arrival of a new school of literary studies that promises–or threatens–to profoundly shift the current paradigm. This revolutionary approach, known as Darwinian literary studies, is based on a few simple premises: evolution has produced a universal landscape of the human mind that can be scientifically mapped; these universal tendencies are reflected in the composition, reception, and interpretation of literary works; and an understanding of the evolutionary foundations of human behavior, psychology, and culture will enable literary scholars to gain powerful new perspectives on the elements, form, and nature of storytelling.
The goal of this book is to overcome some of the widespread misunderstandings about the meaning of a Darwinian approach to the human mind generally, and literature specifically. The volume brings together scholars from the forefront of the new field of evolutionary literary analysis-both literary analysts who have made evolution their explanatory framework and evolutionist scientists who have taken a serious interest in literature-to show how the human propensity for literature and art can be properly framed as a true evolutionary problem. Their work is an important step toward the long-prophesied synthesis of the humanities and what Steven Pinker calls “the new sciences of human nature.”

By: Joseph Hutchison

Joseph Hutchison — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:43:16 +0000

Hello, Reginald! Glad you're back and feeling (quite clearly) much better. I wanted to respond to your series of posts but also wanted to embed a bunch of links, so I did it on my own blog. See http://perpetualbird.blogspot.com/2008/06/reginald-shepherd-and-surrealist.html if you're curious. Keep up the thoughtful work!

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:36:30 +0000

Michael, I'll confess to being a bit mischievous with the Arendt quote; though it really is from an essay of hers published in the New Yorker, that essay later appeared as the introduction to her 1968 selection of Walter Benjamin's work, Illuminations, tr. by Harry Zohn.

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:57:22 +0000

Isn’t The Literary Animal also by Turner? I have Turner’s The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought & Language, which, while loopy, is much more informed than anything by Pinker.
Don, that Arendt quotation is a knockout. Did she reprint it in a book?

By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:46:40 +0000

Lewis Hyde has a great pamphlet called “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and The Booze Talking”

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:24:13 +0000

Many thanks for the cool citation, Aaron! (Actually that essay appeared in the April 1983 issue of Poetry.) It argues, among many other curious things, that "brain processing is essentially rhythmic, that the human nervous system cannot be separated from "the human cultural system it was designed to serve" and that its "operations are essentially social." Also: "It is, we believe, highly significant that [an] analysis of the fundamental LINE in human verse gives little or no significance to breath, or 'breath units,' as a determinant of the divisions of human meter. Thus ... systems of verse based on breath-units, such as 'projective verse' and many other free-verse systems, therefore have no objective validity or physiological function." More: Metrical "variation does not occur despite the rules but because of them. Freedom never means a freedom from rules, but the freedom of rules." And: "... a linguistic type of analysis of meter ... is likely to be fruitful only when the composer has arbitrarily imposed linguistic meaning on the elements of his composition.... There is no 'lexicon' of metrical forms: they are not signs but elements of an analogical structure." Worth looking up, too, for their wild theory of the "three-second LINE." But really what it seems to argue is that "free verse, like existentialist philosophy, is nicely adapted to the needs of the bureaucratic and even the totalitarian state, because of its confinement of human concern within narrow specialized limits where it will not be politically threatening." I do not endorse, but only report, the foregoing. Conclusion, as Flann O'Brien used to say, of the foregoing: now back to your actual thread.