Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German ed. by Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaert, and Olivier Couder

Abstract

Reviewed by: Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German ed. by Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaert, and Olivier Couder Pamela S. Saur Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaert, and Olivier Couder, eds., Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German. Legenda: Germanic Literatures 21. London: Modern Research Association, 2020. 234 pp. Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German is the twenty-first volume of a series of scholarly books, "Germanic Literatures." Chaired by Ritchie Robertson at the University of Oxford, the Editorial Committee of the series currently includes professors from Oxford, London, Dublin, Glasgow, and Toronto. The mission of the series reads as follows: "Germanic Literatures includes monographs and essay collections on literature originally written not only in German, but also in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. Within the German-speaking area, it seeks also to publish studies of other national literatures such as those of Austria and Switzerland." This volume focuses largely on developments from 1950 to 1970 but discusses other years in tracing writers' entire careers. According to the authors of one of the chapters, Thomas Eder and Sven Vitse, the term "neo-avant-garde" distinguishes the era from the classical (Paris from 1860 onwards) and the historical (1900–1920) (130). In this comparative—or "confrontational"—book each chapter pairs a Dutch-language neo-avant-garde writer with a German-language representative of the genre. Segments for each author discussed are devoted to Background, Poetology, Reception, and Literary Practice, with a Conclusion on both. Chapters that pair a Dutch writer (named here first) with one from Germany discuss and compare Mark Insingel and Helmut Heißenbüttel; Armando (the pseudonym of Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd) and Alexander Kluge; and Patrick Conrad and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. Austrian writers, whose chapters are given a closer look below, are Gerhard Rühm, paired with Paul de Vree; Friederike Mayröcker, whose Dutch counterpart is Lucienne Stassaert; and Oswald Wiener, paired with Jacq Firmin Vogelaar. The book contains several illustrations, some of which are concrete poems with visual elements such as words and letters arranged as meaningful designs. The introduction presents bibliographies, previews of each of the book's chapters, and insightful statements on aspects of the "neo-avant-garde" and its many aspects and forms. Defining characteristics mentioned include "scepticism toward language, political authority, bourgeois ideology, and toward the authority of traditional literary genres" (1) and exploitation of "the visual and material nature of poetry" (3). Neo-avant-garde and other experimental literature [End Page 134] of the 1960s also reflected emancipatory and anti-establishment social movements of the time. The chapter devoted to Belgian Paul de Vree and Gerhard Rühm demonstrates that neo-avant-garde literature is connected to and can fruitfully be merged with other artistic genres (de Vree was a painter, Rühm a musician and composer). Both of these multimedia writers created "concrete" or "visual" poetry, but neither "ever limited themselves to a mechanical application of those programmatic principles" (13). De Vree's experimental poetry incorporated quotations, words in regional dialects, references to technology and youth culture, and visual material such as photographs, newspaper clippings, and advertisements. Rühm made many associations between language and music, creating acoustic poetry (for listening), non-conceptual phonetic poetry, and "tone poems" with specified qualities such as pitch, volume, duration of sounds, speed, and tone color (harsh, soft, falsetto, etc.) (41). The chapter "Hybrid Hydra-Heads" contains the book's only discussions of female writers, Austrian Friederike Mayröcker and Dutch writer Lucienne Stassaert. Both created experimental work marked by ambiguity and volatility, although their viewpoints diverged. Mayröcker, who rejected trends and group membership, did not embrace Staessart's explicit left ist viewpoint or her bohemian and anti-establishment sentiments. Mayröcker created "hybrid prose poems," highly original theatrical sketches and operatic pieces that reveal the "unnatural, hierarchical and gendered conditions" (109) of opera training and production. She is also known for "didactic" pieces offering largely aesthetic commentary in formats of "text books, conversation lexicons, instructional manuals, etc." (111). According to the chapter's conclusion: "both authors deliberately wanted to break with conventions of narrative writing and promoted a poetics that could not be...