num_pages: 220
description: The Will to Necessity and Arbitrariness in the Czech Avant-Garde from Poetism to Surrealism is the first monograph study on the Czech avant-garde that positions the Czech movements of poetism and surrealism at the radical center of debates on what the avant-garde was, is, and can be. It is motivated by post-structuralist theory to ascertain what indeed constitutes the avant-garde in and of itself. The overarching inquiry of the book is that raised by Peter BYrger in his seminal if imperfect Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984): The theory of the avant-garde cannot wholly dispense with the study of chance for it is of decisive importance for the self-understanding of the Surrealist movement, at the very least. One will therefore view the category with the meaning the Surrealists gave it as an ideological one that permits scholars to understand the intention of the movement but simultaneously makes it their task to criticize it (BYrger 66). Though BYrger subsumes his discussion of chance to other considerations (montage foremost among them) what B rger does say about chance turns the fulcrum of what I see as the avant-gardeÕs totalizing designs. More than a preoccupation with the new or the vernacular of shocking the bourgeoisie, I argue, the obsession with chance and its objective meaning delimits the ideology of the avant-garde.
language: English
title: The Will to Chance: Necessity and Arbitrariness in the Czech Avant-garde
titlecomplete: The Will to Chance: Necessity and Arbitrariness in the Czech Avant-garde
ratings_count: 2
publisher: Slavica Pub