Theorizing the avant-garde: modernism, expressionism, and the problem of postmodernity

Abstract

Murphy, Richard. 1999. Theorizing Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and Problem of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $57.95 hc. $19.95 sc. 325 pp. One of scholarly criticism's great pleasures is reexamination of a favored subject history has forgotten or misunderstood. Richard Murphy performs such gratifying labor in Theorizing Avant-Garde, a work devoted to recuperation of German expressionism as an example of the Murphy approaches expressionism through lens of Peter Burger's Theory of Avant-Garde, a 1970s text that used dada and surrealism to articulate criteria for politically conscious artistic endeavor. Burger's Theory, which is itself a self-conscious response to Renato Poggioli's work of same title, takes Poggioli to task for his excessively optimistic account of conjunctions between political and aesthetic movements. Murphy revisits Burger to show both that German expressionism shares key characteristics with Burger's own definition of progressive artistic movements, and that Burger underestimated radical potential of aesthetic avant-garde. Murphy begins by recapitulating revolutionary, counter-discursive, and anti-- institutional functions that, according to Burger, make historical avant-garde unique. His accounts of ideology-critique, aesthetic autonomy, epistemological skepticism and anti-organicism are lucid and deft, as are his discussions of their attendant techniques: montage, satire, expressionist epic, rhetoric of melodrama, and satire. Murphy's adjacent goals are to present undeniably striking affinities between more expressionists' strategies and postmodernism, and to respond to critics of and postmodernism who suggest aesthetic movements ultimately foreclose, rather than enable, real political change. To make his case for continuing relevance of German expressionist contributions, Murphy first refines Burger, whose argument he feels suffers from a fundamental ambiguity with regard to category of aesthetic autonomy(27). While he agrees that many modernist texts, and even some naive expressionist texts, undermine their radical potential by substituting an illusion of closure in place of genuinely radical aesthetic autonomy, he creates within Burger's theory a subheading of de-aestheticized autonomous art(33)-an that resists affirmative pressures and therefore co-optation--and proposes that art and life can be brought together through a 'cynical' sublation of and life: bringing down to banal level of reality, fragmenting artistic form, dismantling syntax of poetic language and destroying any lingering sense of harmony and of organic structuring, so that work of leaves realm of ideal and harmonious forms, and descends to disjointed world of modernity. (Murphy 1999, 34) It is precisely this cynical sublation which Murphy's book extols in more 11 sophisticated expressionist works. These expressionists are avant-garde, he argues, not only in their interrogations of convention, but also in their deconstruction of ideology (and institution) of art. The oppositional discourses made possible by expressionist ultimately undermine all false objectivism. Murphy's interdisciplinary account displays an impressive command of literary theory, drawing alternately upon Marxism, discourse theory, structuralism and psychoanalysis. His close readings of Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Weimar-era silent film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, are particularly persuasive, and his examinations of poetics of Dublin and Benn render those works convincingly proto-- postmodern. …