Introduction: avant-garde pluralities, an introduction -- Avant-garde rhetoric : show trials and collapsing discourse at the birth of surrealism -- From anti-culture to counter-culture : the emergence of the American hybrid vanguardism -- Critique of the artist as (re)producer : Warhol, The Living Theatre, and Frankenstein -- Brechtian aesthetics and the death of the director in Peter Brook's The Mahabharata -- From cutting edge to rough edges : on the transnational foundations of avant-garde performance -- Performing the vanquished vanguards : nostalgia, globalization, and the possibility of avant-gardes -- Victims of history and the ghosts of the avant-gardes : a plausibly deniable conclusion.
Summary:
"Pronouncements such as "the avant-garde is dead," argues James M. Harding, have suggested a unified history or theory of the avant-garde. His book examines the diversity and plurality of avant-garde gestures and expressions to suggest "avant-garde pluralities" and how an appreciation of these pluralities enables a more dynamic and increasingly global understanding of vanguardism in the performing arts. In pursuing this goal, the book not only surveys a wide variety of canonical and noncanonical examples of avant-garde performance, but also develops a range of theoretical paradigms that defend the haunting cultural and political significance of avant-garde expressions beyond what critics have presumed to be the death of the avant-garde. The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s) offers a strikingly new perspective not only on key controversies and debates within avant-garde studies but also on contemporary forms of avant-garde expression within a global political economy"--Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.