Dada culture : : critical texts on the avant-garde / / edited by Dafydd Jones.

• Superior document: Avant garde critical studies ; 18
• TeilnehmendeR: Jones, Dafydd
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam : : Rodopi,, 2006.
• Year of Publication: 2006
• Language: English
• Series: Avant garde critical studies ; 18.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (327 pages) :; illustrations

How Dada is to break its cultural accommodation and containment today necessitates thinking the historical instances through revised application of critical and theoretical models. The volume Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde moves precisely by this motive, bringing together writings which insist upon the continuity of the early twentieth-century moment now at the start of the twenty-first. Engaging the complex and contradictory nature of Dada strategies, instanced in the linguistic gaming and performativity of the movement’s initial formation, and subsequently isolating the specific from the general with essays focusing on Ball, Tzara, Serner, Hausmann, Dix, Heartfield, Schwitters, Baader, Cravan and the exemplary Duchamp, the political philosophy of the avant-garde is brought to bear upon our own contemporary struggle through critical theory to comprehend the cultural usefulness, relevance, validity and effective (or otherwise) oppositionality of Dada’s infamous anti-stance. The volume is presented in sections that progressively point towards the expanding complexity of the contemporary engagement with Dada, as what is often exhaustive historical data is forced to rethink, realign and reconfigure itself in response to the analytical rigour and exercise of later twentieth-century animal anarchic thought, the testing and cultural placement of thoughts upon the virtual, and the eventual implications for the once blissfully unproblematic idea of expression. From the opening, provocative proposition that historically Dada may have been the falsest of all false paths , the volume rounds to dispute such condemnation as demarcation continues not only of Dada’s embeddedness in western culture, but more precisely of the location of Dada culture . Ten critical essays – by Cornelius Partsch, John Wall, T. J. Demos, Anna Schaffner, Martin I. Gaughan, Curt Germundson, Stephen C. Foster, Dafydd Jones, Joel Freeman and David Cunningham – are supplemented by the critical bibliography prepared by Timothy Shipe, which documents the past decade of Dada scholarship, and in so doing provides a valuable resource for all those engaged in Dada studies today.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material / Dafydd Jones -- Short preface / Dafydd Jones -- Introduction / Dafydd Jones -- The Mysterious Moment: early Dada performance as ritual / Cornelius Partsch -- The Body of the Voice: corporeal poetics in Dada / John Wall and Dafydd Jones -- The Language of “Expatriation” / T.J. Demos -- Assaulting the Order of Signs / Anna Katharina Schaffner -- The Prosthetic Body in Early Modernism: Dada’s anti-humanist humanism / Martin Ignatius Gaughan -- Montage and Totality: Kurt Schwitters’s relationship to “tradition” and “avant-garde” / Curt Germundson -- The Mortality of Roles: Johannes Baader and spiritual materialism / Stephen C. Foster -- To Be or Not To Be ... Arthur Cravan: subject, surface and difference / Dafydd Jones -- Ernst Bloch and Hugo Ball: toward an ontology of the avant-garde / Joel Freeman -- Making an Example of Duchamp: history, theory, and the question of the avant-garde / David Cunningham -- A Decade of Dada Scholarship: publications on Dada, 1994—2005 / Timothy Shipe -- List of illustrations / Dafydd Jones -- Contributors / Dafydd Jones.