Avant-garde Literature Research Articles

Life and Death in Yu Hua’s Novels——Taking To Live and The Seventh Day as Examples

Yu Hua’s works have consistently excelled in exploring the fundamental meaning of life within tales of hardship and tragedy. Through a series of books such as To Live and The Seventh Day, Yu Hua has crafted multiple tragic stories featuring characters from different historical periods and with diverse personalities, thereby expressing his unique perspectives on life and death. The existing studies mostly analyze the life and death plot in isolation and lack an analysis of the influence of traditional culture on the formation of their concepts. This paper will take the original texts of the novels To Live and The Seventh Day as the basis, and use the method of textual analysis to analyze the views of life and death in the novels. Through the study, it is found that Yu Hua’s works present a unique new style of death aesthetics and life philosophy concepts. Through the research, it is discovered that Yu Hua’s works exhibit a unique new aesthetic of death and philosophy of existence. Yu Hua, a trailblazer in avant-garde literature, integrates traditional views on life and death with contemporary societal concerns. Through an exploration of the fragility of human physiology and the resilience of the human spirit, Yu Hua’s works offer a fresh perspective on life and death for individuals grappling with existential uncertainties. This aids in guiding individuals to seek the significance of their own lives and adopt an objective stance towards mortality.

Поэзия России и Америки: к новым возможностям языка

The book by Vladimir Feshchenko, a Russian researcher of the language of poetry and a publisher of avant-garde literature, is devoted to Russian and American poetry of the language experiment in the 20th and early 21st century. Using examples from Andrei Bely, Russian futurists, Alexander Vvedensky, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, E.E. Cummings to the American poets of “language writing” and modern Russian-speaking young poets, the similarity of the philosophical and linguistic foundations of the language experiment, the convergence and differences of literatures, the personal interaction of authors from both countries are considered in the book. The analysis of a number of American and Russian poems from the point of view of the language of poetry is given. V. Feshchenko's book is of interest to researchers of Russian and American poetry, the avant-garde, the language of poetry, and the interaction of literatures.

Grigore Cugler și apunakismul. De la prozele scurte din Apunake și alte fenomene la Afară-de-Unu-Singur

This article continues a previous approach on Grigore Cugler’s avant- garde texts (re)exploration and (re)discovery, Grigore Cugler și dimensiunea spectaculară a „romanului” Apunake / Grigore Cugler and the spectacular dimension of Apunake ‘novel’ (2023). As it is already known, Grigore Cugler represents a writer often associated with Urmuz, one of the central models of Romanian avant-garde literature. By using close reading methods with connections to stylistic analysis, the article focuses on the short stories that accompany the false ‘novel’ Apunake from the volume Apunake și alte fenomene (1934), such as Match nul, Logodin, Criptomestrula, Drumul dragostei, Scrisoare, and Erată. By continuing a previous approach on which we highlighted the way the poetics of the absurd spectacular is presented in Cugler’s texts, we aim to show a perpetuation of the writer’s specific poetics, that of apunakism. Apunakism represents a form of manifestation of Grigore Cugler’s poetics of absurd in his avant-garde texts, characterized by the presence of ‘twists and turns’ type of situations, ‘upside-down’ and alienated characters, alternate worlds, linguistic and stylistic mechanisms and experiments that continuously surprise the reader. We will also observe the perpetuation of this specific poetics and a particular narrative discourse of the writer crystallized in the texts from the 1934 volume to the 1946 volume, Afară-de-Unu-Singur.

Avant-Garde Literature and the Ground of Rights

With its demonstration of human frailty and finitude, avant-garde literature offers a more rigorous jurisprudence of rights than juridical or legal discourse is capable of offering itself. The paper takes as example the lowering of fault requirements in Canadian criminal law, which weakens common-law protection of the fundamental right to liberty through a fault standard that is “not concerned with what was in the accused’s mind, but with what should have been there.” Avant-garde literature, in opposition, demonstrates—and cannot help but demonstrate, in a mode unique to its discourse—the real limits of seeing and knowing, as shown through a reading of Claude Ollier’s La Mise-en- Scène.

Introduction

One of the major contributions of Julia Kristeva in all the diverse fields of study she has worked in since her emergence as a theorist of semiotics and avant-garde literature in the mid-1960s is her attention to the body and the bodily. Some of her central concepts of that period, such as the semiotic, semanalysis, the chora, and signifiance, have helped theorists in the Arts and Humanities but also in the Social and Medical sciences do justice to the complex vulnerability of the subject-in-process/on trial at the crossroads between biology and language. It is significant that she comes to develop the concept of the subject-in-process/on trial in a 1972 essay on Antonin Artaud, whose corporeal understanding of writing enabled Kristeva to theorize a literary experience that refuses to aestheticize psychic or bodily suffering and that aims to become a laboratory for the incubation of new, less species-arrogant perceptions of the human.

Сталин и «курско-орловский диалект»: заметки на полях дискуссии

The article explores a link between the “discussion on the problems of theoretical linguistics” in 1952, which culminated with the demise of Nikolai Marr's teaching upon the publication of Stalin's piece on the subject, and the formation of the Union of Soviet writers under Maxim Gorky's chairmanship in 1934, in which Stalin took a very active albeit largely behind-the-scene part. In both cases, the tenor of the abrupt ideological and institutional reorganization of literary and academic life lay in the rejection of heteroglossia and conflicting plurality of voices as the mode of linguistic and literary practice, a principle that had dominated the early Soviet avant-garde literature and the “new teaching about language” by Marr and his followers. The Union of Soviet writers rejected stylistic experiments of the 1920s in favor of the imagined normative purity of “Russian literary language.” The idealized image of the gentry estates in the Kursk and Orel region (podmoskovnye usadby) as the cradle of national literature and “pure” literary language of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Turgenev, was eloquently expressed by Bunin in emigration. Embraced by Gorky and supported by Stalin, this idea was established as the strategic guideline for Soviet writers. It apparently also stood at the root of Stalin's fantastic assertion, eighteenth years later, of the dialect of the “Kursk-Orel district” as the place of the origin of the Russian national language.

Joyce and his Apostles: The Exchange of Capital between Joyce and transition

In the interwar Parisian literary field, transition was among the most influential expatriate magazines, promoting forms of new, avant-garde literature. Its main feature was the serialisation of James Joyce’s Work in Progress, which was to be published as Finnegans Wake in 1939. Joyce and transition had become closely connected to each other through their literary exchange and the representation of Joyce by transition was beneficial to both the author’s and the literary magazine’s success. Simultaneously, Sylvia Beach, the owner of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, represented a key factor to both of their careers. This paper interprets these exchanges through the Bourdieusian framework of symbolic capital, arguing that their involvement with each other could be regarded as not just an exchange of literary merit, but also of power, as through their positions in the literary field Joyce and transition, with the help of Beach, were able to substantially influence each other’s literary careers and prestige.

Филологические исследования на Северо-Востоке России

The article provides information on the scientific work carried out at the Faculty of Philology of the North-Eastern State University, in historical and modern aspects. Since the university was founded, the departments of the Faculty of Philology have been widely conducting research in linguistic and literary fields: dialectology and literature of the North-East of Russia, Russian phonology, classical and modern Russian literature, the phenomenon of camp literature, translation studies in the aspect of literary translation, foreign avant-garde literature, etc.

Theorizing Asiatic Contradiction: The User Experience of Contemporary Korean Literature

Theorizing Asiatic Contradiction:The User Experience of Contemporary Korean Literature Ho Duk Hwang (bio) After Avant-garde, What Can Literature Do? At the moment, in Korea and East Asia, the question of what literature is, is at once an old question and one that is being raised again today. This is because, while the last century's tradition of revolutionary literature or avant-garde literature seems to have ended, some Korean literature still seems to be engaged in the transformation of Asian life not only in Korea but in many places in East Asia. During the past century, in Asia there have been multiple answers in response to what literature is, what it should be, and what it can do. For Natsume Sōseki, one of the founders of modern Japanese literature, literature was emotions incorporated with impressions (F+f). Notably, a Japaneseness, juxtaposed against the Western, or a sort of antimodernist cultural craze, was inscribed in "emotions" (f). Literature was basically the site of the fever of catch-up modernization and the question, Who are we? Even for Yi Kwang-su, who read Sōseki, literature was the medium of emotions (情), which was distinguished from knowledge (知) or will (意). What is interesting about Yi's discussion of emotions (情) is that it understands emotions to be a type of affection that mediates the call for enlightenment or the demand of ethics and tasked it with the national endeavor of overcoming coloniality. In East Asia, questions concerning the rationale for literature often also took the form of questioning what literature must not be. In order to avoid writing a banal literature that is like "toilet paper," Lu Xun and Kim Su-yŏng, the most defiant writers in Korea and China, wrote in the manner of "struggle" (掙扎, zhēngzhá), or "negation," and succeeded in creating the forms of political rationale that truly confronted the times by making everybody, including themselves, uncomfortable. Literature was subversion. [End Page 89] However, the question I am asking is a different one. What can literature really do? In fact, this question was raised by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and also by Hyŏn Kim, the prominent critic of contemporary Korean literature, in 1977. The proposition that "literature uses that which is unusable" or that "literature does not oppress and prompts thinking about oppression through reflection" was the most cited sentence in the last half century (H. Kim 1991, 50, 189). The proposition that literature is useless but does not oppress, and therefore is a liberating movement, wielded enormous influence. Certainly, some may consider that the most orthodox Korean literature is the national literary theory of Nak-ch'ŏng Paek and others, which proposed, against Hyŏn Kim, that the avant-garde aspect of Korean literature simply refers to the avant-garde of the liberation movement of oppressed nations, and that avant-garde literature shares the values of anti-imperialism, anti-feudalism, and decolonization. Whereas Kim considers the revolution and avant-garde movement of sensibility and imagination the distinction of literature, Paek thinks political subjectivity is the site of literature. However, even Paek's statement of revolutionary literature, which subsumed avant-garde literature into a realism based "national literature," presupposed the avant-garde position of literature (especially political literature). In modern Korea, the belief that "literature," free from capital and politics, is at the avant-garde of not only the imagination but also the intellect, appeared to be an indestructible myth even long after postmodernism and the decline of socialism. As is well known, Kōjin Karatani is the one who spoke of "The End of Modern Literature," based on the transformation of the nature of Korean literature at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Karatani brought back Sartre's proposition that "literature is the subjectivity of a society in permanent revolution," and wrote that such a longing for permanent revolution and the subjectivity of society had come to an end even in Korea (Karatani 2005). While Karatani experimented and sought a general theory in the space of the US, he also highlighted the Asian function of modern literature, which at once confronts remote and internal colonialism. Karatani attributed the possibility of Japanese literature onto...

OBRISI SUMATRAIZMA U MISTIČNOJ NOVELI „LUNAR“ JOSIPA KULUNDžIĆA

The paper deals with a comparative reading of Lunar - the marginalized novelist debut of Josip Kulundžić and The Journal of Čarnojević - a paradigmatic work of Serbian avant-garde literature. The aim of the paper is to point out the literary coordinates that are important for understanding Kulundžić’s novel (Kulundžić’s explicitly and implicitly expressed poetic considerations, as well as the author’s review of Crnjanski’s Journal of Čarnojević), which pro- vide the basis for recognizing sumatraistic elements in this novel. Bearing in mind that in the period after the First World War, various forms of regard “Kulundžić’s mysticism” and Crn- janski’s Sumatraism as poetically and ideologically related concepts, representing a specific “incarnation of the longing for the unity of everything that lives and feels” (J. Kulundžić).

Come, Sorrow in a Mouthful 3, and: Cloud, and: Table, and: Riverside, and: Teacher 2, and: Dear Light

Come, Sorrow in a Mouthful 31, and: Cloud, and: Table, and: Riverside, and: Teacher 2, and: Dear Light Translated by Jaewuk Kim (bio) Come, Sorrow in a Mouthful 31 The electric razor my father-in-lawused for over a yearwhen he lay in the hospital bed,I brought to my office to useafter he had passed.A year or two laterwhen I had to shave one morningI opened the razor and thereremained a fine powder of skin and hair.I dusted it off with a shaving brushand rinsed the inside with tap waterbut the powder of skin and hair didn't go away, [End Page 291] so without much thought I tossed the razorinto the trashcan.I never told my wife,but for a year or twomy father-in-law had remainedinside my office drawer. [End Page 292] Cloud I call the father cloudfather andthe son cloud sonwhen I try to embracethe son andkiss himI get drops of rainy fog on my clothesdon't embrace too fiercelywere father's words,a half-hearted embracenever got father wet,father cloud's cloud words [End Page 293] Table After a good meal the children leaveon the table ripped burger wrapsand dented Coke bottlesand the paper napkins they used to wipe their mouthsthose things aren't aware of one anotherand are both close and a little far away children, this is usin this world where the stars go grayand dreams give no rest,we never once thinksomeday we will be cleared awayby the world that raised us in its arms [End Page 294] Riverside There is a dog in deep slumberat the back of a small restaurant in Pusanby the riverside where I would often go to eat at the sound of my footsteps,it wakes, looks far ahead,and then falls back to sleep with such hazy eyes,I too look, at the vinyl greenhousespread in whitelike some mad realization [End Page 295] Teacher 2 Last day of classes a student studying English literaturegave me a bag of candies and inside was a card professor you've taught us so muchand so well, but this lousy poem is all I havewritten and now I graduate yes, that's exactlywhat I wanted to say I studied with good professorswithout a worry in the world,but I write useless poemsand have taught them to be poetry in the eyes of my motherwho prayed to the ancestors to help improve my writingin the eyes of my kidswho thought their father being published in the papers was cause for celebration because I've been writing such shameful poetry,the student's wordsstill ring in my ears [End Page 296] Dear Light It would have been better if the light hadn't comebut it camethe crack was revealedand in the crack the light suffered,which exposed the scarand that's what it dislikedthe light groped for thingsthat rot in thick darknessno one could bind the lightand no one could lull its writhing to sleeptired and starved, the light stabbedthe eyes of things cryingthemselves to sleep and sucked on their tearsto cry in someone's steadthat's what it wantedno one could end that slumberno one could take inand care for that lifesomeday when the tears drythe light will leave,a place where no one diesand is never born again,would such a place even exista place where no one is bornand never dies again,would such a place have light [End Page 297] Jaewuk Kim Jaewuk Kim is a PhD student in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. His research interests lie in modern and contemporary South Korean avant-garde literature and film, particularly with a focus on Dadaism and Surrealism. He is currently translating a volume...

Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, un surrealista a medias

Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, a Semi-Surrealist. This work aims to establish similarities between surrealist poetry and the poetry of the Peruvian poet Emilio Adolfo Westphalen. The first part of the text is aiming to outline main characteristics of avant-garde literature in Peru between the years 1920 and 1930 and the process of implantation of a surrealist movement born in Europe. The mentioned process of implantation was hard and complex, especially, because it clashed with the local political system and partial renunciation of the previous movements such as Modernism, Symbolism, and Romanticism. Also, French surrealism had to face literary Peruvian critics who were not ready for the arrival of something new. Consequently, Emilio Adolfo Westphalen expressed his discontent over the fossilized literary critic and his poet friends in his correspondence and essays. Westphalen was not only interested in the surrealism of others, but he was also interested in surrealism for his poetry. Our study is based particularly on the following sources: the essays of Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, the surrealist theory included in the Manifestoes of Surrealism, and the critical works by Mirko Lauer, Américo Ferrari, etc.

Ideology in Polish Translations of Anglo-American Literature

Ideology has always influenced translation, yet this fact became a topic of scholarly research only in the 1990s. The working of ideology in literary translations most often manifests itself as a conflict of value systems. From vast reservoir of foreign sources, the native axiology absorbs values that it needs to sustain its culture. It is not a coincidence that Anglo-American literature, propagating ideas of democracy and individual freedom, became popular in Poland in the first half of the nineteenth-century when Poland did not exist as a state. Only a century later, American literature was the most popular of all foreign literatures in pre-1939 Poland. World War II changed this situation, and the Soviet-controlled apparatchiks favored translations that were “politically correct.” Yet, because of their connections with earlier revolutionary movements, avant-garde Anglo-American writers were often published during the communist regime, for example Virginia Woolf, whose novels were standardized to appeal to the tastes of popular readers. After Poland regained independence in 1989, the national book market was privatized and commercialized, and avant-garde literature needed advertising to get noticed. Cormack McCarthy’s novels were translated into Polish on the wave of popularity of the Coen brothers movie based on No Country for Old Men. The two Polish translations of McCarthy’s novel try to sound like a typical hard-boiled realistic fiction. This is where the ideology of consumerism meets the ideology of communism: literature is a means to sustain – and control – a cultural monolith, where all differences are perceived as possible threats to social order.

A Century of Chinese Literature in Translation (1919–2019): English Publication and Reception

A Century of Chinese Literature in Translation (1919–2019): English Publication and Reception

Auf den Spuren Frank Wedekinds. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewiczs 622 Stürze des Bungo, oder Das dämonische Weib (622 upadki Bunga czyli Demoni czna kobieta)

Following in Frank Wedekind’s footsteps: The 622 Downfalls of Bungo, or The Demonic Woman by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz The work of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939), the leading representative of Polish avant-garde literature in the first half of the 20th century, only became known outside Poland as late as the 1960s. The role of Konstanty Puzyna was pivotal in the popularisation of Witkiewicz’s work. Puzyna, a renowned specialist in the fields of literature and theatre, highlighted the relationship of Witkiewicz’s oeuvre to European tradition, apparent especially in his intertextual approach. There are numerous sources of inspiration. However, although many of them have been thoroughly analysed, the influence of Frank Wedekind’s work – often treated as self-evident – has hitherto not been the subject of literary research. The article discusses this issue, presenting an analogy between the “double tragedy” of Wedekind’s Lulu (Earth Spirit, 1895 / Pandora’s Box, 1904), and Witkiewicz’s novel The 622 Downfalls of Bungo, or the Demonic Woman. Witkiewicz in an inventive, parodic way adapts the topos of the demonic woman, as well as other of Wedekind’s figures and motifs, into the world he creates, forging their partial deconstruction and metamorphosis.

Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America by Gorica Majstorovic

 Reviews Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America . By G M. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. . x+  pp. £. ISBN ––––. is highly innovative contribution to the field presents a timely re-evaluation of the Latin American modernist and avant-garde literature of the inter-war period through an anti-imperialist lens, drawing on a range of conceptual frameworks from both postcolonial and decolonial critical traditions. Building on the scholarship of Walter Mignolo, Beatriz Sarlo, Pheng Cheah, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Global Modernities examines the Latin American literary histories of the early twentieth century both as a nexus of decolonial thought and cultural production within the Global South and as a forerunner of the transnational South–South solidarities which would emerge during the s and s. Defining the Global South as both physical and geographical space, as well as ‘a discursive position from which theories of globalization are exposed and denounced’ (p. xiii), Gorica Majstorovic’s text maintains a focus which is firmly transnational. Considering avant-garde literary periodicals from across the continent , Mexican petrofiction, novels from Ecuador and Argentina, and travel writing from Nicaraguan and Dominican authors, this study sheds light on the multiple modernities at work in Latin America during this period. e corpus is impressive in its diversity of both geography and form, and successfully uncovers a network of connections between modernist cultural experimentation and emergent decolonial thought. e intermedial bent of the book is key here, as it facilitates a broader dialogue between the central literary texts of the corpus and other forms of contemporary mass culture, such as cinema, radio, and photography. Chapters  and  examine the output of a range of Latin American avant-garde magazines of the s, foregrounding the cultural and intellectual dialogue which these publications generated across the Global South as the engine of an alternative modernity which encompassed Andean indigenismo, the Harlem Renaissance, and the peripheral European modernism of the Balkans. Chapter  presents a new perspective on the novels Baldomera by Ecuadorian writer Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco and Los siete locos by the Argentine Roberto Arlt, using the aesthetics of Russian constructivist cinematic montage to elicit new meanings from both texts. Chapter  focuses on the mobility of Latin American modernities in the travel writing of, among others, Rubén Darío, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and Ricardo Güiraldes. Finally , in Chapter  the author addresses the concept of cosmopolitanism in the Global South in the inter-war years through a study of Armando Discépolo’s  play Babilonia, foregrounding socio-economic factors such as mass immigration, precarity, and marginality to identify a dissident and radical ‘improbable cosmopolitanism ’ (p. ). Overall, Global Modernities convincingly advances a key thesis, namely that a more profound understanding of modernity generally, and in Latin America in particular, cannot be achieved without critical engagement with issues of empire, indigeneity, and decolonialization. By highlighting the threads of antiimperialism and transnational solidarity that run through the continent’s inter-war MLR, .,   literary production, this study destabilizes hegemonic anglophone subjectivities of the modern and posits the Global South as a key site in the articulation of a plural modernity in which aesthetics and the politics of social justice are inextricably intertwined. E B L Cortázar and Music. By N R. (Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, ) Cambridge: Legenda. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. Alongside literature and politics, music is an inescapable presence in the work of Julio Cortázar. In this thorough and wide-ranging study, Nicholas Roberts provides a detailed analysis of the myriad ways in which music appears in the novels, short stories, and critical work of the Argentine. In the process, he reveals that music was no mere leitmotiv, but rather provided the structural tools for key works. Cortázar loved music, wrote passionately about his preferences, and created memorable characters—Horacio Oliveira, the stuffy French critic Bruno, Johnny Carter—for whom music is more than just entertainment or pastime: it is the stuff of life itself. Roberts divides his subject’s musical interests into three broad genres: la música culta, or classical music; tango, Argentina’s (and Uruguay’s) beloved national sound; and jazz, from early New Orleans stylings through to...

Bajo el signo vanguardista: las otras voces de un sueño en libertad /

The contribution of Agustín Espinosa as a leading promoter and creator of avant-garde literature in our islands is unquestionable. His role as a crucial representative of this period of our literary culture found wide resonance in other writers who, thanks to their literary work, give solidity to a unique moment of creative freedom in the environment of our islands. This article seeks to illustrate this relevance by giving due prominence to other lesser-known authors who belong to this remarkable period.

In search of the text generating structure: Jakobson’s theory of the poetic function of language

The classic work of Roman Jakobson,“The Newest Russian Poetry. Sketch One. Ap­proaches to Khlebnikov”, is invariably referred to in the works on the history of structuralism, formalism and the history of the methodology of humanities. This article aims to address sev­eral questions: what are the epistemological attitudes of Jakobson and how are they imple­mented in his work? Can this 'disorganised' and 'sketchy' text be interpreted in context of the future attitudes of the scholar? The avant-garde literature of the early twentieth century not only created new methods of text generation but also required a new epistemological approach and a change in the recep­tive perspective. Jakobson's work is one of the first experiments in describing a new aesthetic phenomenon. Analysing language through shifts, Jakobson explores it in a structuralist way. In “The Newest Russian Poetry” the scholar summarises the ideas that became fundamental for him in the 1960s-1970s: the ideas of the teleological nature of poetry, a close connection between mental and language structures, and the relevance of the identification of text struc­ture as a relatively stable set of relations for the analysis of sense-making and text generation. Exploring the concept of literariness, Jakobson reveals a system of universal and interlevel methods of generating poetic speech. These observations have not lost their relevance and can be applied to the analysis of both avant-garde and classical texts.

Aproximaciones a la estética del grotesco moderno en “Mi cuarto en el hotel” y “El vapor” de Felisberto Hernández

La critica especializada se ha enfocado en estudiar la obra de Felisberto Hernandez, sobre todo sus nouvelles, desde la literatura fantastica y vanguardista, por lo que es escaso el analisis literario de sus relatos iniciales. Con los objetivos de ampliar el enfoque de estudio de la produccion del escritor uruguayo y demostrar la disolucion del hombre moderno, se analizan dos de sus primeros cuentos desde la estetica de lo grotesco, segun Wolfgang Kayser.

BeneViolence and Faux-Pornography in the Romanian Avant-Garde Literature

BeneViolence and Faux-Pornography in the Romanian Avant-Garde Literature