Reviewed by: Neo-Avant-Gardes: Post-war Literary Experiments Across Borders ed. by Bart Vervaeck Vincent Kling Bart Vervaeck, ed., Neo-Avant-Gardes: Post-war Literary Experiments Across Borders. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. 416 pp. Readers of Bart Vervaeck’s edited volume Neo-Avant-Gardes will find ample attention paid to Austrian literature, both in general and as to particular authors, but will also find contributions from familiar scholars (such as Thomas Eder, Roland Innerhofer, and Sabine Müller) placed against a successfully organized wider backdrop of comparative study. The range is broad and its editorial arrangement correspondingly admirable in relating topics and authors coherently. This compendium volume results from research conducted by members of the ENAG (European Neo-Avant-Garde Collective) and is divided into two parts. The first covers “Concepts, Genres and Techniques” (33–215) and the second “Movements and Authors” (219–397). Building on observations by scholars of the avant-garde like Renato Poggioli and Marjorie Perloff for expanded understanding, the authors here are defining the new avant-garde as more formally and conceptually challenging than earlier practices had been. Movements like “Zero, Fluxus, arte povera [ . . . ] conceptual art, performance art, happenings and body art” represent a “new incarnation of the avant-garde” (1) that requires redefinition of terms and rearrangement of historical categories. “Based on the recognition that the term ‘neo-avant-garde’ helps to define specific national and transnational literary trends, this book purports to explore the relevance of the concept of a neo-avant-garde for the study of literary innovations in the long sixties and beyond” (3). The aim is no less ambitious than “prompting a new paradigm in literary historiography” (3). Poggioli points out that the term avant-garde was first used disapprovingly by Baudelaire in Mon cœur mis à nu to chide the French predilection for applying military terms where they do not belong—a point worth remembering, because a theoretical concept like “avant-garde” can often live up to [End Page 147] its name by charging in and overrunning the terrain. That is, literary theory often claims the right to displace the works it should be serving and takes dominance as an autonomous power of its own, moving from ancillary status to hegemony. The authors, aware that notably many avant-garde artists of the 1920s and ’30s gravitated to fascism (5), espouse a non-hierarchical, non-ideological approach (11), but the nature of any discussion like theirs necessarily privileges some movements, writers, and works over others. They try dodging the implications of their inherent restrictiveness by saying that they are “Compiling a Corpus: Selecting the Literary Neo-Avant-Garde” (16), to quote one of the section headings, but what is this “compiling” except an effort to establish a canon, usually disparaged by theoreticians as an exercise of authoritarianism? The volume is arranged with special clarity, with great care taken in the sequence of contributions. Before that, however, it would be evasive not to point out the weaknesses that the introduction, like so much work devoted to theory, cannot help exhibiting. The first is the echo chamber effect—one set of abstract observations, removed from any particular literary work, rebuts an earlier set of abstractions, resulting in the vagueness and imprecision of discussion inside a bubble with much terminological pedantry and over-specification. The effect is solipsistic, creating a hieratic system closed to the uninitiated. The second is constant resort to ungainly, imprecise terms. Is anything ever “reified” outside of theoretical “discourse”? Where else, outside this jargon, are ideas “valorized”? Who will explain “periodisation”? And can any literate person really accept “afterwardsness”—advanced here with a straight face—as an adequate translation of Freud’s term Nachträglichkeit? The introductory essay (1–30) is subtitled “Why Bother?” but it’s not clear that a convincing answer has emerged. Mercifully, the rest of the essays are much more lucid, wary of needlessly specialized terminology. Moreover, the book moves logically from general to particular, from abstraction to example and illustration, dissipating the fog caused by hot air. The sequence of contributions follows a clear line from the discussion of concepts on their own to the illumination of specific works, authors, and movements based...
Read full abstract
Sep 20, 2024
Irina Alekseevna Dudkovskaya 
Open Access