Dietrich Scheunemann

Essays offering new approaches to the debate on orality and literacy, taking in recent developments in modern electronic media.

Orality, Literacy, and Modern Media

This collection of critical essays is designed to lay the foundations for a new theory of the European avant-garde. It starts from the assumption that not one all-embracing intention of all avant-garde movements - i.e. the intention of "reintegrating art into the practice of life" (Peter Bürger) - but the challenge of new cultural technologies, in particular photography and cinema, constitutes the main driving force of the formation and further development of the avant-garde. This approach permits to establish a theoretical framework that takes into account the diversity of artistic aims and directions of the various art movements and encourages a wide and open exploration of the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of the great variety of avant-gardist innovations. Following the theoretical foundation of the new approach, individual contributions concentrate on a diverse range of avant-gardist concepts, trends and manifestations from cubist painting and the literary work of Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein to the screeching voices of futurism, dadaist photomontage and film, surrealist photographs and sculptures and neo-avant-gardist theories as developed by the French group OuLiPo. The volume closes with new insights gained from placing the avant-garde in the contexts of literary institutions and psychoanalytical and sociological concepts. The main body of the volume is based on presentations and discussions of a three-day research seminar held at Yale University, New Haven, in February 2000. The research group formed on this occasion will continue with its efforts to elaborate a new theory of the avant-garde in the coming years.

New Perspectives : Avantgarde, Avantgardekritik, Avantgardeforschung

European Avant-garde

Alexander Graf

This volume on avant-garde film has emerged as part of a wider reassessment of 20th century avant-garde art, literature and film carried out in the framework of a research project at the University of Edinburgh. It paves the way for a fresh assessment of avant-garde film and develops its theory as an integral part of a newly defined conception of the avant-garde as a whole, by closing the gap between theoretical approaches towards the avant-garde as defined on the basis of art and literature on the one hand and avant-garde cinema on the other. It gathers contributions by the most esteemed scholars in the field of avant-garde studies relating to the “classical” avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, to new trends emerging in the 1950s and 1960s and to the impact that innovative technologies have recently had on the further development of avant-garde and experimental film. The contributions reflect the broad range of different moving-image media that make up what we refer to today simply as “film”, at the same time as reconsidering the applicability of the label “avant-garde”, to offer a comprehensive and updated framework that will prove invaluable to scholars of both Moving Image Studies and Art History disciplines.

Avant-garde Film

New essays by leading scholars giving a new picture of the variety of German expressionist cinema.

Dietrich Scheunemann

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