| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £4.20
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Theory of the Avant-garde (Theory & History of Literature) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £4.20, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Synopsis
Suggests a theory of art, tests against the French and German avant-garde movements of the twenties, and discusses hermeneutics, ideology, aesthetic categories, and the autonomy of art.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4 reviews
40 of 42 people found the following review helpful
Modernism vs the Avant-Garde
9 April 2002
Format:Paperback
This book argues a clear difference between two often confused terms: Modernism and the Avant-Garde. According to Peter Burger, Modernism dealt with formal evolution of style (in visual arts as well as in literature), while the Avant-Garde project involved radical change of the way of life. Consequently,the greatest Modernist movements of the 20th century, according to Burger, must be Cubism and Abstractionism, as they were mainly about visual distortion, and the relevant masters were Picasso and Kandinsky. On the other hand, the Avant-Garde produced its own most ambitious projects with the Russian Constructivism and Surrealism, and its geniuses must be Tatlin, Rodchenko, or Marcel Duchamp. All this is argued quite intellegently; the only reason for my 4 stars instead of 5 being that Burger brings on too much polemics with Marxist or semi-Marxist theorists (Lukacs, Adorno, etc.) and his own view is sometimes hard to disentangle from what he criticizes.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Dialectical Aesthetic Theory.
30 Sep 2009
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Theory of the Avant-Garde is probably the best book on aesthetics I've ever read. Burger argues that aesthetic theory has previously neglected to deal with art as an institution in bourgeois society. Unlike medieval works, art under capitalism is relatively autonomous from various social institutions. While sacral art was integrated into the church, and courtly art into the court, art under capitalism develops into its own sphere, to be judged exclusively by aesthetic criteria. At the same time, art is separate from the praxis of life; its value consists precisely in its ability to take one away from everyday experience. Drawing from Marcuse's classic essay "On the Affirmative Character of Culture," Burger argues that art's aesthetic unity combined with its autonomy from the praxis of life serve to negate the political engagement of any individual work. This palliative effect in turn exposes the partiality of autonomous art; its autonomy actually serves a deep structural function of a cultural anodyne.
The avant-garde comes in as the first moment that artists became self-conscious of the effects of art's autonomy and sought to destroy it. Burger uses a Hegelian-Marxist framework (although he is sensitive to teh Althusserian critique) to argue that the avant-garde constituted the moment of self-criticism of the institution of art which revealed the truth of the institution's past, just as Marx's self-criticism of bourgeois society produced historical materialism, making possible a generalized science of history.
This summary only scratches the surface of Burger's 100 page essay. In developing this central argument, he has fascinating arguments regarding Benjamin, Adorno, Lukacs and Brecht, and thought-provoking readings of various avant-gardiste techniques. I'd venture to say there are few books triple the length of this one that contain the same amount of careful, creative, and exciting writing.
The avant-garde comes in as the first moment that artists became self-conscious of the effects of art's autonomy and sought to destroy it. Burger uses a Hegelian-Marxist framework (although he is sensitive to teh Althusserian critique) to argue that the avant-garde constituted the moment of self-criticism of the institution of art which revealed the truth of the institution's past, just as Marx's self-criticism of bourgeois society produced historical materialism, making possible a generalized science of history.
This summary only scratches the surface of Burger's 100 page essay. In developing this central argument, he has fascinating arguments regarding Benjamin, Adorno, Lukacs and Brecht, and thought-provoking readings of various avant-gardiste techniques. I'd venture to say there are few books triple the length of this one that contain the same amount of careful, creative, and exciting writing.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Interesting and Concise
1 Mar 2012
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Burger's concise text on the theory of the avant-garde is a particularly lucid and well argued explication of the meaning and lasting significance of the avant-garde as movement, and it manages to develop a position in relation to the history of art in a very few strokes. Burger interrogates the rise of modernism and the increasing "autonomy" of the arts in the bourgeois era, and argues that the avant-garde was a critical response to art as an institution and its strictures. While the avant-garde was largely constituted by a false sublation of the autonomy thesis, it was successful in exposing the elements of artistic production that make up the art world as an institution. While the text is not without its problems, it is an excellent work of aesthetic theory, and among the best historical assessments of the avant-garde we have.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
