| The dissertation discusses four French artists of Romanian origin---Tristan Tzara, Isidore Isou, Benjamin Fondane, and Victor Brauner---in terms of their approach to the notions of Otherness and redemption. Tuned to a recuperative mood, my project brings them together in a collective study for the first time. What especially intrigues me is not solely the parallelism of their personal and ideological quests, but more importantly the haunting similarities in the versions of the redemptive discourse they created, deeply imbued with and defined by the values, taste, rhetoric and look of their Romanian/French/Jewish condition. My research demonstrates the importance of their contribution to the avant-garde and also proposes a new interpretation by focusing on otherness and redemption. I thus offer a large-scale reassessment of their artistic production as a prolonged discourse on the Western crisis of cultural values, while mapping their avant-garde activity in a series of critical constellations from roughly 1918 to the 1950s. A major study of material that deserves to be known better in the United States, my work is essential to an understanding of French, Romanian, and Jewish avant-garde politics, culture, and identity as well as of their broader place in literary studies and the visual arts. |
