The ghosts of the avant-garde(s)
Subtitle: exorcising experimental theater and performance
By: James M. Harding
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 234
ISBN-13: 9780472118748; 9780472029082; 9780472029365
Subjects: PERFORMING ARTS; Theater; History and criticism; Avantgarde; Modern (late 19th Century to 1945); Experimentelles Theater; History & Criticism; Performance; ART; Experimental drama; Experimental theater; History
Description: "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"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Internet Archive - 2

Internet Archive 2
Table of contents: title: Introduction: avant-garde pluralities, an introduction; title: Avant-garde rhetoric : show trials and collapsing discourse at the birth of surrealism; title: From anti-culture to counter-culture : the emergence of the American hybrid vanguardism; title: Critique of the artist as (re)producer : Warhol, The Living Theatre, and Frankenstein; title: Brechtian aesthetics and the death of the director in Peter Brook's The Mahabharata; title: From cutting edge to rough edges : on the transnational foundations of avant-garde performance; title: Performing the vanquished vanguards : nostalgia, globalization, and the possibility of avant-gardes; title: Victims of history and the ghosts of the avant-gardes : a plausibly deniable conclusion.