The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks

by Philip Nel

Overview

The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks by Philip Nel. Was there a sudden break in the world of art, literature, and music when modernism gave way to postmodernism? Philip Nel attacks the notion of tremendous and sudden change in artistic understanding and literary practice. Instead, in The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks he proposes that a series of small but far-reaching changes drew understanding from modernism to postmodernism. What bonds these two periods together? The constant agent of change, Nel argues, was the avant-garde. Tracking its influence on novelists, popular culture figures, and children's authors, this book re-evaluates how twentieth-century culture has been traditionally divided into "modern" and "postmodern." Suggesting that a modernism and postmodernism division prevents accurate evaluation of a work, Nel realigns our conceptions of twentieth-century literature, art, and music. Focusing on eight figures--Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Dr. Seuss, Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Chris Van Allsburg, Laurie Anderson, and Leonard Cohen-as representative, this book examines works along a spectrum of political involvement. Unencumbered by excessive jargon but deeply rooted in theories of postmodernity, Nel's work has an accessible style, maintaining a balance between high theory and popular discourse. The first book to analyze postmodern children's literature, it revives the radical Dr. Seuss by reading him alongside avant-garde artists. Nel argues that Chris Van Allsburg speaks the Internet generation's vernacular, using a surrealist idiom to pose questions that linger beyond his picture books' final pages. Nel's book is a nuanced and wide-ranged rereading of how postmodernism displays art's ability to imagine a better world. Philip Nel is an assistant professor of English at Kansas State University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781604732528
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	10/14/2002
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Philip Nel is an assistant professor of English at Kansas State University. He is the author of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter Novels: A Reader's Guide. He has been published in Children's Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	vii
	Introduction: The Historical Avant-Garde and Twentieth-Century America	ix
1.	America Meets the Avant-Garde: Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, and the 1930s	3
2.	Dada Knows Best: Growing up Surreal with Dr. Seuss	41
3.	Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Postmodernism: Donald Barthelme and the Historical Avant-Garde	73
4.	"Amid the Undeniable Power of the Montage": Modern Forms, Postmodern Politics, and the Role of the Avant-Garde in Don DeLillo's Underworld	96
5.	Just a Dream? Chris Van Allsburg and Surrealism at the End of the Twentieth Century	116
6.	Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Laurie Anderson's and Leonard Cohen's Music for the Masses	136
	Conclusion: In-A-Gadda-da-Oswald: Photoshop and the Politics of Ambiguity	176
	Notes	183
	Bibliography	193
	Illustration Credits	211
	Index	215