The Avant-Garde and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism

The collection of essays The Avant-garde and the Margin: New Territories of the Modernist Avant-garde refigures the critical and historical picture of the modernist avant-garde by introducing a variety of less-commonly discussed geo-artistic sites and dynamics. The contributors explore the multifaceted relations established between the avant-garde centers (France, Germany, England, and others) and their counterparts in the cultural periphery (Greece, India, Japan, Poland, Quebec, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia), as well as the unique artistic and literary dialogues which these encounters engendered. The primary concern of the anthology is the set of relations established between the center and the margin, the redefinition of which was pivotal for the formulation of the modernist avant-garde aesthetic project itself. While enriching the kaleidoscopic picture of modernism, the essays in this collection also offer new methodological approaches to this polychrome cultural image. In this way, the collection avoids the pitfalls of both the traditional diffusionist/Eurocentric model of the world and the more recent over-relativization of the positions of the margin and the center. In their stead, the anthology proposes a hermeneutics of encounter that is simultaneously spatial and historical, aware of its limits but convinced of its own necessity.

SANJA BAHUN-RADUNOVIC, Ph.D., received her doctorate degree in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University. She has published articles and book-chapters on a variety of topics, ranging from psychoanalysis, through modernist literature and arts, to the refigurations of literature in marginal settings, to the theory of the novel. Bahun-Radunovic has completed a book-length study Modernism and Melancholia: History As Mourning-Work and she is currently occupied with the co-editorial work on the collection of essays The Intimate and the Extimate: Violence and Gender in the Globalized World. Bahun-Radunovic has authored two books of creative writing and is the recipient of many scholarly and creative writing awards. MARINOS POURGOURIS, Ph.D., is Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown University. His specialization is the twentieth century Greek literature and his research interests include European modernism, modernist lyric, psychoanalytic criticism, the classical subtext, and film. His publications include essays on the metaphysical theories of Odysseus Elytis, the Homeric subtext in the poetry of Yiannis Ritsos, the politics of history in Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Lukacs, and the influence of Nietzsche’s writings on Nikos Kazantzakis. He has completed a book-length study on the poetic metaphysics of Odysseus Elytis and he is currently co-editing a volume on Balkan history and literature. His poetry-collection Of Myth and Brine was published by Dodoni Publications, Athens, in 2002.