This project will describe, in part, the central theoretical problem of the avant-garde, in phenomenological, theoretical, and ultimately ontological terms. The object of this chapter will be to acquire an understanding of the tension between the improvised phenomenality of the avant-garde, and its assumption and hypostatization into discourse. In doing so, I trace the development of the metaphor of avant-garde, from the relative indeterminacy, contingency, and ephemerality of the military and historical antecedent, to the mounting prescriptiveness in ideality of the modern metaphor. From its historical antecedent in military art, to the earliest recorded days of its use in cultural history, I contend that the central character of the avant-garde is the negative affect of its practical ethos, a generic exigency which elaborates along a spectrum of behaviors. All of these behaviors, in their deliberate eschewal of conventionality and dogma, must manifest themselves negatively. It is the cognizable of these behaviors which, to conventional and prescriptive theoretical modes of consciousness, appears as deviation, separation, fragmentation, antagonism, and ultimately agonism. The irony of this thesis then, is the extent to which the theory of the modern-garde, and indeed, the modern disposition of the metaphor, recapitulates these restrictive and prescriptive modes of consciousness. In the poetry of Velimir Khlebnikov and Osip Mandelstam, I will pursue how this restrictive metaphysics of presence is deliberately frustrated in the creation of new avenues and modalities of creativity.

Creator

• Olowoyeye, Folahan

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-q717-3j46

Subject

• Slavic literature
• Literature
• Modern literature

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15138
• etdadmin_upload_744123

Keyword

• avant-garde
• Mandelstam
• critical theory
• Khlebnikov
• literature

Date created

• 2020-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright