This is an original analysis of the novels of Gombrowicz, a fascinating figure of the 20th-century European avante-garde. Berressem examines the novels in light of both contemporary literary theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

"The Poetic Avant-Garde" compares three avant-garde groups active in the era between the world wars: those surrounding Jorge Luis Borges, W.H. Auden, and Andre Breton. These groups were composed of poets and writers who made use of the avant-garde's characteristic modes of self-expression: the publication of small journals, unorthodox attention-getting tactics, and interaction with the mainstream press. However, their differing aesthetic, social, and political agendas illustrate the surprisingly broad range of avant-gardism in the interwar era.
Strong looks at the choices these three...

Mastery of many sorts emerges in new configurations in Peter Burger's "The Thinking of the Master" as an idea developed by Hegel in the master/slave dialectic in his "Phenomenology of Spirit" as a quality embodied in the work of certain twentieth-century "maitre-penseurs, " or "master thinkers"; and, not least, in the expertise of Burger himself as he negotiates and clarified a critical intersection of contemporary French and German thought. The author of the classic "Theory of the Avant-Garde, " Burger here considers what several seminal thinkers--among them Bataille, Barthes, Foucault, and...

The fourteen essays that make up this collection have as their common theme a reconsideration of the role historical and cultural change has played in the evolution of twentieth-century poetry and poetics. Committed to the notion that, in John Ashbery's words, "You can't say it that way anymore," "Poetry On & Off the Page" describes the formations and transformations of literary and artistic discourses, and traces these discourses as they have evolved in their dialogue with history, culture, and society. The volume is testimony to the important role that contemporary artistic practice will...

This volume collects a decade of writing on poetry, language, and the theory of writing by a major figure in contemporary poetry -- one of the most innovative and conceptually challenging poets of the last twenty-five years. In essays that are wide ranging, richly detailed, and complex in their surprising juxtapositions of disparate material, Steve McCaffery works to undo the current bifurcation between theory and practice -- to show how a poetic text might be the source rather than the product of the theoretical principles against which it must be read.

McCaffery approaches the poetic work...

Among the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, the German movement remains one of the least understood in the current avant-garde and modernism debates. Rainer Rumold fills this gap with the first large-scale reassessment of the heyday and afterlife of German expressionist and Dada productions as a prolonged crisis of literary culture.

A poet takes another's text, excises this, prints over that, cancels, erases, rearranges, defaces--and generally renders the original unreadable, at least in its original terms. What twentieth-century writers and artists have meant by such appropriations and violations, and how the "illegible" results are to be read, is the subject Craig Dworkin takes up in this ambitious work.
In his scrutiny of selected works, and with reference to a rich variety of textual materials--from popular and scientific texts to visual art, political and cultural theories, and experimental films--Dworkin...

In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry.

Andrews addresses - from a poet's perspective on how to understand and make use of contemporary practice - poetics and its role as a choreographer of discussions and theorizing about meaning. By focusing on the ways in which meaning is produced and challenged in contemporary literary work, Andrews grounds his work in cross-disciplinary theory. He analyzes poetics and the production of meaning; alternative traditions and canons and stylistic resources as a signpost for writing; and innovative contemporary poetry and its break with many of the premises and constraints of even the most...

"Opposing Poetries "presents a selection of Hank Lazer's writing on a range of issues in contemporary American poetry. Through a series of recurring cultural, material, and institutional perspectives, Lazer investigates the assumptions and habits that govern conflicting conceptions of contemporary American poetry, while refining, reconsidering, and questioning his own and modern theorists' assertions and claims relating to experimental poetry.
Volume One examines the shift in the governing assumptions of contemporary poetic practice. Lazer inspects the key critical works addressing...