| Many signature characteristics of modernist literature are prefigured in the visual and performance art of the European avant-garde. Though in a linear understanding of history the phenomena are concurrent, Lyotard's description of postmodernism as the "nascent state" of modernism offers a different framework for understanding the avant-garde's "influence" within modernism proper. In essence, avant-garde experiments and theorizations in visual and performance mediums enable literary modernism. Evidence for this is both historical and textual, grounded in the shared activities and experiences of radical artists and writers, particularly in Paris and New York from 1910--1930, and in the fact that modernist innovations in literature are frequently visual and performative in nature. These two views have numerous proponents. But to grasp fully the function of the avant-garde, the politics of modernism needs reconsideration, the task undertaken in this study. Utopian visions of egalitarian social relations mark the work of many premier Cubists, Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists. Though these artists often explicitly connected this with the burgeoning socialism movement, critics today typically connect modernism with fascism. Yet for those modernist writers who looked to the avant-garde for inspiration---political or otherwise---the new art represented not just innovative formal techniques, but a surprisingly consistent philosophy of art, culture, and society. If the avant-garde prefigures the modern, then at the heart of modernist literature lies a strain of proto-socialist optimism rarely recognized. Critics usually deploy Benjamin to draw modernism-fascism connections, but Adorno offers more appropriate descriptions of the avant-garde's political potential, arguing that authentic art has the power to jar people out of a false consciousness in which the mind willfully fails to recognize the contradiction between a belief in autonomy and the exchange value reality of Capitalism. A primary goal of avant-garde artists across movements was the destruction, redefinition, and de-institutionalization of "beauty," a goal sought precisely because conventional norms of beauty led to false art and false understandings of the world. The avant-garde aesthetic---an "anti-aesthetic" in this sense---offers means to circumvent normalized modes of perception and interpretation and provide an accurate depiction of the real relations of production. |
