Traversing the Fantasy of the "Vanguard” via Critical Avant-garde Studies: An Inquiry into the Aesthetic
Wan-li Chen (Indiana University of Pennsylvania)
Vitalpoetics, Vol.1 No.2, June 2008
(This paper was presented in 2007 EAPSU conference, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.)1
Literature and theory’s functionality (social, political and cultural) has been a constant theme in academia. A literary scholar, Mark William Roche devotes his recent scholarship, Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century, published in 2004, to the defense of literature’s role in this current age of technology. Similarly, a respected scholar, J. Hillis Miller, who received the MLA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005, wildly celebrates literature and literary theory’s future role as a leader and a dominant educational force in his 1991 article, “the Function of Literary Theory at the Present Time.” What is shared between Roche and Miller is their declaration of literature and theory’s “vanguard” role as significant players on educational and social stage.
As influential scholars, curiously, Roche and Miller’s defensive stances echo the emerging crisis of the English Studies. The crisis might be seen from the provocations in some of the influential magazines in America. For example, the New York Times headlined that “the curtain had closed on literary and cultural theory,” “The Latest Theory Is Theory Doesn’t Matter” and “Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs” (qtd. in Howard). The Boston Globe teased intellectuals’ “anxiety of non-influence” (qtd. in Lisagor). Even though these crisis identified by these magazines remain as the topics for dispute and debate,2 it is hard to simply dismiss these signs, since the crisis manifest themselves as urgent calls for interdisciplinary trends in the English Studies.3 In these contexts, Roche and Miller’s defensive positions seem to highlight their self-positioning as the vanguards who intend to utilize their influential power in the academia and provide their "innovative" answers in response to the above mentioned challenges and controversies.
Given the doubleness of “vanguard” inscribed in the two literary critics’ works in the context of the crisis of the English Studies, it is necessary to situate the discussion on Roche and Miller’s works within Critical Avant-garde Studies. Informed largely by the fluctuating dynamic between politics and art,Avant-garde Studies has sustainable interest in autonomous creations’ social bases and their revolutionary roles in society,and is highly reflexive of the aesthetic/ critical, originality/ representation, and autonomy/ functiondivides that shape certain ideological formations and closure. Several avant-gardists’ works are essential to this study’s inquiry into the aesthetic, including Peter Bürger’s landmark Theory of the Avant-garde, Jürgen Habermas’s “the Incomplete Project of Modernity,” Paul Mann’s Theory-Death of the Avant-garde, and Barret Watten’s The Constructivist Movement.
The Autonomy of the "Vanguard" Discourse
In “The Function of Literary Theory at the Present Time,” which first published in 1989 and republished in his 1991 book collection, Theory Now and Then, J. Hillis Miller recounts major challenges, paradigm shifts, and concerns particularly within literary studies. Miller reports two challenges in the literary studies: one is the emergence of “comparative literature” that contests literary critics’ orthodox practices; the other is the disappearing of “special knowledge or membership in a particular class with a particular education” (390). Although he agrees with the “breaking down” of the old Arnoldian consensus— “the assimilation of the best,” or western canons, as literature’s function—as a way to confront with these challenges(389), curiously, he seems to be eager to initiate a new consensus. As Miller posts a rhetorical question,“What rationale for the study of the humanities should be put in the place of the old consensus?” (391). Then, almost immediately, he presents his rationale that involves theory’s essential role. Miller states:
Preservation, conservation, the keeping of the archives, the whole work of memory, remembering, and memorialization… [remain] an indispensable task of humanistic study.[…] One of the important effects of the new modes of literary theory has been to redefine what it is that is worth remembering and what procedures of recovery and reinterpretation should be followed to make sure we remember what we want to remember. (392)
In Miller’s generalizing statement, literary theory’s abstraction, its utopian potential and its critical continuity are definitelycrucial tothe creation of a unified principle of judgment, and to the affirmation of literary canons’ value and function. Drawing from theory’s “fundamental principle” of unification, Miller calls for theory’s essential role in redefining a new consensus or a new set of literary canons. However, a question is worth pondering: if the function of literary theory remains unchanged as the traditionally-defined ones, what distinguishes the old consensus from the new one, the old canons from the new ones? With the same defining principle, would such distinction be meaningful?
Similar to Miller’s celebration of literary theory’s future role, Mark William Roche defends literature’s role in an age of technology. In the beginning of Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century, Roche writes:
The topic [why literature matters in the 21st century] is innovative in at least two respects. First, the question of moral justification of literature and literary criticism tends to be neglected” by philosophers and literary critics, with their shift of interest to “historical and sociological issues, pragmatic concerns, and questions of ideology or interpretation than on the fundamental principles of their profession, including the value of literary and literary criticism.” (2)
The primary reason that literature matters, for Roche, is its intrinsic ethical values or "moral justification." In the introductory section, Roche reflects upon external forces that impact upon, intervene in, and threaten literary studies. Examples include literature’s role and function still under the control of the states and the universities, as well as the rise of film studies in literary scholarship due to the increasing of technological productions (1;3). Despite his attempt to reflect upon literature’s institutional grounds and its dialogue with technological inventions, Roche’s arguments in the book mainly return to conservative discussions on the role of literature by defending it against these institutional, economical, and structural challenges. Comparing literature to art, he stresses literature’s conventional, intrinsic values: “aestheticism” and “ethics” (205). By granting literature its aesthetic status and its “moral legitimacy” (9), Roche envisions literature’s role in the 21st century as a moral guidance to technology’s ambiguous nature in creating the needs as well as problems (5).
Situating Miller and Roche’s discourses within Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-garde would highlight ironies in these "vanguard" discourses with their ideological closure and their inadequate engagement with the subject of their investigation. In the case of Roche, I argue that the structure of his discourse resembles what Bürger calls a “dogmatic criticism” that “sets its own theory against the one it criticizes and infers from the claim to truth of the former the untruth of the latter" (liv). Roche’s Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century highlights three shifts in developing the argument. In the first part Roche presents a “normative” discussion of literature and literary criticism, wildly drawing from their “moral principles” and values (12). The second part of the book introduces “strengths and weakness in contemporary literary criticism” (13). In the last part, Roche synthesizes the previous two “normative” and “descriptive” parts byunderlying “the universal value of literature and literary criticism, and their specific possibilities and challenges in the twenty-first century” (13). These moves curiously correspond to what Bürger expects from a dogmatic criticism, which "remains external to its object" and "asks for no more than the proof or the mere statement that its own theory is true” (liv). In light of Bürger, I suggest that Roche’s primary defensive position, relying heavily upon oppositions against the challenges in the age of technology, fails to situate his argument within fields outside of literary studies.4 Even though Roche intentionally employs a dialectical structure—thesis, antithesis and synthesis—I argue that his firm, subjective position in favor of literature, undercuts the investigating powerof the dialectic.
The function of literary criticism for both Roche and Miller hasvery little to do with provocation than with affirmation.5 Roche concludes his book with the value of literary criticism:
A valid literary criticism fulfills the following moments: […] it seeks to focus on the aesthetic dimensions of the work, attending thereby to the moment of truth, the sensuous moment…; it seeks to unravel the interrelations also of part and whole, doing justice to each in its full complexity; it does not fail to ask the evaluative question, which presupposes a knowledge of basic aesthetic principles, hermeneutic efforts to grasp the work at and, and knowledge of other works with which the given text might be compared. (114-115)
Here, Roche emphasizes literary criticism on its fulfillment of the task of setting up “standard” judging principles. Making the equivalence of theory’s aesthetic, transcending power with epistemology that answers the "evaluative question," for Roche, not only validates the very principle’s value but also affirms literature’s anticipated moral guidance in the 21st century. Roche’s stress on theory’s unifying function is shared by Miller in his anticipation of theory to be the guidance of future curriculum design and to be the defender of “orthodox” practices in the English—whether reading literary texts or reading the world as texts—because it corresponds to the aesthetic quality in the theoretical thinking processes, involving a transcendent, metaphysical and idealistic prospect.
To unveil Roche and Miller’s construction of theory, it is worth revisiting Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-garde. Theory’s limitation, according to Bürger, lies upon certain “assumptions,” “beliefs,” or illusive ideals that establish a “direct relationship to its object,” while remaining in the disengaged, abstract thinking process (liv-lv). It is critics’ responsibility, for Bürger, to see through theory’s “self-deception” and to engage themselves within the subject of its own criticism, from which “new knowledge” might evoke (xlix, lv). Indescribing literary works’ “social function,” Bürger states that the “definitions of function are not inherent in individual works but are socially institutionalized” (lii). Here, Bürger demands an institutional reflexivity from critics who are interested in the functionality of literature and theory. That is, the discussions of literature and theory’s autonomous functions in the 21st century would not be valid without taking account of the fact that literature and literary theory are institutionally constructed,rather than self-sufficient and self-defined.
Institutional reflexivity provides a key to think through the dualistic modes of the aesthetic/critical and the autonomous/ functional. In "revolutionary ideas in art,” Philip Rahv, a historical avant-gardist, speaks straightforwardly to intellectuals’ illusive ideology of being autonomous that “The intelligentsia is materially and politically dependent on society and its classes, but the illusion of self-determination has enabled it to act and think independently of both masses and ruling strata and to produce moral and aesthetic values which oppose and criticize the bourgeois spirit” (Orton and Pollock 314). By underlying the "social base" of literature, Rahv attempts to think beyond the literature/ politics divide. Also,Leon Trotsky wrote in his“revolutionary ideas in art” that “‘truly independent creation cannot but be revolutionary by it very nature, for it cannot but seek an outlet from intolerable social suffocation ’” (qtd. in Orton 311). Here, Trosky indicates that art’s revolutionary function cannot be fulfilled without a concurrent quest for truth and a determined social struggle for power. By extension, literature as an analogy to artis also a ‘truly independent creation’ that involves ethical struggles in fighting against “social suffocation” and incontesting political contents, as to create rupture and to serve as a revolutionary seed. Drawing from Trotsky and Rahv’s revolutionary thoughts, I argue that especially in the current interdisciplinary trends it is crucial to traverse the fantasy of internal autonomy that stagnates the function of literary theory and literature, as seen in Roche and Miller’s works.6 The failure in doing this part intheir analyses, to some extent, makes the very articulation of why literature and theory matter in the 21st century to remain merely in the rhetorical level, passive and several-years-behind, and thus lose the discourses’ futurity and functionality.
Literature and Theory ‘s Aesthetic Function
This section will examine the role of the aesthetic, crucial to understanding Miller and Roche’s direct translation of literature and theory’s autonomous functions into vanguard positions, while dialoguing with avant-gardists’critical view on the aesthetic. Important in this is, Bürger’s criticism of Adorno’s “autonomy aestheticism”; the embodiment of aestheticism in Habermas’s “the false programs of Modernity” (1754-56); Watten’s envision of an aesthetic, that is the“imagination of participation” of a futurist vision (xxii, xix). What aspects of the aesthetic are they trying to unveil that is different from Miller and Roche’s understanding? What is mediated by the aesthetic? Or more specifically, what ideological stance and formation participate in the aesthetic quality of literature and theory?
In his Theory of the Avant-garde, Bürger criticizes Adorno’s “autonomy aesthetics” and Adorno’s effort to define art’s “social function” through its intrinsic, autonomous value of aestheticism. It is Adorno’s view that “Only in the isolated form of monad-like works of art can truth still be spoken about this society.” (Bürger 11). Paradoxically, the “social function” Adorno prescribes to art is “‘functionlessness’” and “‘its intrinsic movement against society, not its manifest statement’” (qtd. in Bürger 10). In other words, for Adorno, art’s “social function” embodies an invisible, interrogating, “righteous” force, which are predicated to art’s isolation from society. Very critical of the ideology that supports Adorno’s statements, Bürger is quick to point out the tangible dilemma between “autonomy” and “social function” in Adorno’s theory of aestheticism. Bürger examines this dilemma, “Only in the isolated form of monad-like works of art can truth still be spoken about this society. This is the function of art that Adorno can refer to as ‘functionlessness’ because it can no longer be hoped that art will provoke change” (11). Given art’s self-exclusion from and the oppositional position against the empirical world, and the lack of complex dynamic between art and the lifeworld, indeed, not only is there no hope for social change in Adorno’s vision of art’s role, but also the role of art Adorno anticipates is possible to limit within art’s ideological ground. If the prospect Adorno envisions that art can speak “truth” to the society is not an “illusory” function, what could that truth be? [7]
It is crucial to bridge the gap between a discourse, its underlying ideology and its functionality. The “negative” function Adorno has in mind, paradoxically, derives from an ideological ground, serves as an end in itself, and is self-sufficient in the double “affirmation” of art’s isolation and its function of speaking the truth to the society. Bürger’s critique of the aesthetic in the case of Adorno might also be useful in critiquing Miller’s discourse. To Miller, the function of literature and criticism is predicated on the intrinsic/ extrinsic dichotomy, which is manifested in an ideological setting. Responding to previous debates about literary study’s social function and its “performative effects,” Miller regards these issues as the misplacement of literature’s role (387: 389). Before discussing the “extrinsic relation of literature” in society, according to Miller, we need to acquire a solid understanding of the intrinsic relation in literature, that is, the mastery of literature’s rhetorical and figurative language (386-87). Indeed, the function of theory and literature in Miller’s mind derives from the intrinsic, that is, “functionlessness.”
Central in Miller and Roche’s attribution of a vanguard role to literature and theory are theory’s unifying function, and literature’s aestheticism and ethics, both of which are at the core of Habermas’s criticism of the failed programs of modernity. According to Habermas, the project of modernity was first formulated by philosophers in the eighteenth century (such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller), who endeavored to “develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic” (1754). The integrations of the three spheres in philosophy—epistemology, aesthetics and ethics—and the isolation from the lifeworld remain as the hard kernel of Habermas’s criticism of modernity’s false programs. The scientific discovery or the “control of natural forces” in the eighteenth century inspires a rationalistic mode of subjectivity and a holistic view of “understanding of the world and of the self, moral progress, the justice of institutions and even the happiness of human beings” (Habermas 1754). As Habermas states, “Enlightenment aesthetics had circumscribed its object domain” and manifested as a “terroristic reason” that objectified the “dynamic between literature, art, music and lifeworld” (1755-756). The objectification or aestheticization transforms into the “aestheticist concept” in the age of Romanticism, involving the “autonomy” or the “consciousness of art for art’s sake” and the ultimate detachment from the lifeworld. The autonomous aestheticism that serves function of “the utopia of reconciliation with society,” then conflates into modernism’s deliberate alienation from life. As Habermas puts it: “This modernist transformation was all the more painfully realized, the more art alienated itself from life and withdrew into the untouchableness of complete autonomy” (1755). Surrealists, according to Habermas, have an effort to “force a reconciliation of art and life” (1755). However, the collapse of contents and aesthetic form negates culture—which informs the “cognitive, moral-practical and expressive” sphere in life—so that Habermas interprets that the remainder of the surrealist revolt is “abstraction” (1756).8
Revisiting Miller’s discourse will illuminate a curious link to Habermas’s criticism of “Enlightenment aesthetics” that objectifies dynamic in the lifeworld (1756). For Miller, theory’s aestheticism is not so much sensual as conceptual, serving the function of “integration” and justification. As Miller claims, “One of the important effects of the new modes of literary theory has been to redefine what it is that is worth remembering and what procedures of recovery and reinterpretation should be followed to make sure we remember what we want to remember” (392). Here, theory seems to manifest itself as a “terroristic reason,” a rationalistic mode of thinking that standardizes memory, justifies master narratives about memory, preserves memory in the form of new canons; however, it deprives of the multi-faceted, humanistic way of remembrance. The source of “terror” originates from Miller’s fundamental, ideological persistence in critical contingency from the old Arnoldian consensus, that is, canonized literature as the singular influence of morality.
Also, there is a structural relevance between Roche’s discourse and Habermas’s criticism of surrealism. Unlike Miller, Roche’s view oftheory’s aestheticism is sensual, conceptual and ethical. The conflation of the three is exemplified in Roche’s statement about the role of literary theory. That is, theory attends to “the moment of truth, the sensuous moment” (conceptual and sensual), seeks to unravel the interrelations also of part and whole, doing justice to each in its full complexity” (conceptual and ethical), and “ask[s] the evaluative question, which presupposes a knowledge of basic aesthetic principles” (sensual and conceptual) (114-15). Roche’s discourse seems to risk in conflating the categories of aestheticism, ethics and epistemology, which is a mistaken attempt to overarch them by oversimplified equation between aestheticism, abstraction, and liberation.
Bürger’s critique of the aesthetic in the case of Adorno is that Adorno’s view of the aesthetic exists purely on ideological grounds, justifies the intended separated status of art, and adds the excessive meaning of “social function” to that intended separated status. Crucial to Habermas, lifeworld or the public sphere—which embodies challenges of the material base of intellectuality and subjectivity, such as economics, the unbalanced attribution of power and the inevitable power struggles—becomes a powerful contest field for theorization, abstraction, separation, and autonomy. Both Bürger and Habermas criticize the aesthetic as it mediates between perception and conception, equates abstraction and transcendence with true liberation and freedom, and reinforces a centripetal dominance of subjectivity, all of which in turn justifies its own separation from the lifeworld.
Different from Miller and Roche’s envisioning of theory and literature’s future roles that risks in the aesthetic’s illusive potential from which a disengaged position and an unexamined utopia derive—avant-gardists share a futuristic perspective that has a potential to be realized via evoking ruptures at the present. For example, Barrett Watten’s the Constructivist Movement embodies an effort to think beyond the “dual aesthetic/critical dilemma” through “the constructivist movement” (xix). Instead of utilizing the aesthetic to stabilize internal conflicts and to justify a detachment from society, Watten’s view of the aesthetic has a symbolic meaning in a future tense. As he states, “Constructivism stabilizes crisis as it puts art into production toward imaginary ends” and “[t]he constructivist movement is thus a confrontation of aesthetic form with social negativity” (xxi, xxii). Here, Watten’s use of the aesthetic embodies an “imaginary alternatives” in the future, which has to be attained by not only an individual effort to confront the “crisis,” social symptoms and injustice (“social negativity”), but also by a collective effort to obtain relevantly equal distances between texts and contexts, subject and object, originality and representation,9 aestheticism and criticism, and a standardized discourse and a concept surrounded by it, as to envision solutions (56).
Distinct from Miller and Roche’s view of theory’s functionality, Paul Mann views the function of theory as a genuine engagement in its subject matter, and as an everlasting resistance against its ideological closure. Mann informs us in Theory Death of the Avant-garde that no ultimate function we can attribute to criticism because any criticism that shares an avant-garde conscious does not invent genuine solutions, at the engaged, present moments in the lifeworld: “[C]riticism no longer speaks the voice of alterity, or speaks it only in order to cancel what is always left of it; that the material conditions of cultural theory prevent it from inventing solutions for those who still wish to carry out the avant-garde’s legacy” (145). While addressing the condition of postmodernism, Mann states that “Nothing here is intended to describe this disappearance, to mark it as a solution, a superior truth, a better technology, a more coherent program. No prophecies, no calls to arms, no pretense of moral support, no manifestos” (145). The aesthetic involved in these statements is neither sensual nor conceptual. It is an aesthetic power of “negativity” that constantly recuperates inquiring energy until it reaches its “teleological exhaustion” (5). The process of recuperating energy is also known as the “second theory-death,” as Mann notes that “the point is to use the thought of disappearance, this second theory-death, to mark the limits of critical surveillance. Theory can no longer project new models into the field once traversed by the avant-gardes, for those projections have now revealed their real purpose.” Here, a clear distinction can be drawn between Mann’s view of theory and that of Miller and Roche, which is, for Mann theory functions not as the unifying or structuring principle of the subject of its inquiry, but as the power of provocation in an analysis and a critique, as well as the direct confrontation of the very criticism’s limitation through turning against itself.
Concluding Remarks
In the end, critical avant-garde studies contests the ideology of the aesthetic as the self-sufficient and self-determined ideal realm, adding critical perspectives to aesthetics, or various utopian representations of the aesthetic,by claiming them as being inseparable from or contaminated by their social base and political entanglement. Most of the avant-gardists discussed in here understand the function of criticism not in a linear progression, but often in a dialectic move breaking from the old mode of thinking literature and politics as a dichotomy. Also, critical avant-garde studies reminds us the gradually-forgotten history about the revolutionary role of autonomous entities like literature and art—their everlasting struggles to find a voice for the subaltern, and their effort to traverse the fantasy of the aesthetic and its illusive autonomy. Drawing these perspectives from critical avant-garde studies would re-vitalize the stagnated uses of literary theory and literature in the current English Studies and open the field up to various interdisciplinary exchanges. I contend that literary critics cannot position themselves as vanguards in the crisis of the English Studies, or in the interdisciplinary trends without distancing themselves from the sublimity of the aesthetic, and without seeing the aesthetic in the crisis ofthe field that constantly rejuvenates itself by recuperating inquiring energies to make itself meaningful.
Notes
1 Traversing the Fantasy is borrowed from Slavoj Zizek’s works, The Sublime Object of Ideology (p. 65, 74, 118, 126-27), The Plague of Fantasies (p. 10, 30, 36, 75-80), and "Is It Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace?". Traversing the fantasy denotes "subjective destitution"and "desublimation," involving the creation of ruptures to break throughthe ideological closure and to open up an inquiry into the aesthetic, and thus characterizes the theoretical framework of this study.
2 For alternative views, see Jennifer Howard’s “The Fragmentation of Theory” and Megan Lisagor’s “Theory: Still on the Table.”
3 For a representative work on this issue, see Julie Thompson Klein’s Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity.
4 Not until the very end of the book does Roche discuss a necessity of interdisciplinary approach. “[I]f literature and literary criticism are no longer anchored in the idea that the object of interpretation and evaluation is to garner a window onto an ideal sphere, why should we continue the enterprise? Instead of addressing the problems of the technological age, literary criticism reproduces them and contributes to them—first, by interpreting works it no longer views as having aesthetic merit or by turning to an infinite number of random topic, often beyond the range of literature, as all topics are now deemed equally worthy of study” (p. 258-259).
5 Roche is critical ofcharacteristics of modern arts, such as “rupture”, “asymmetry”, “chaos”, “dissonance," andtheir celebration of the freedom of expression, for the lack of “manifestations of synthesis” in modernity (46-50). As he claims, “[i]f the modern world is dissonant, and dominant art mirrors this dissonance, then a nonmimetic, avant-garde art would portray what is counter to dissonance, an ideal world” (47). However, Roche misinterprets avant-garde arts as merely counter forces.
6 New Critics also sustain themselveswith an illusive view of internal autonomy, empowering themselves with the elevating power of literature—aestheticism and ethics—to justify their aloofness from society, and to assert the value of poetry that unifies and transcends the turbulent post-war situations drawing clear boundaries between literature and politics. In Politics of Knowledge Richard Ohmann comments pointedly that New Critics constructs“narrow self-interest to ideological dream” (p.8).For historical accounts of New Critics, also see Richard Ohmann’s _Politics of Knowledge.
7 For a differentview on Theodor Adorno, see Edward Said’s “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals” where Said draws from Adorno’s theory to exemplify a discourse’s provocative potential for social reformation.
8 The remainder of surrealist revolt is not only an “abstraction” but also a challenge of the dominance of reason in subjectivity and counter-hegemony movements in the lifeworld. Habermas does not see to attend to the latter issue in his work.
9 The theme is essential in Mann’s book chapter on “Post” and Watten’s discussion of “cultural poetic” in The Constructivist Movement: from Material Text to Cultural Poetics.
Works Cited
Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-garde. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
Habermas, Jürgen. “Modernity—An Incomplete Project.” _The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. _Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. 1748-1759.
Howard, Jennifer. “The Fragmentation of Theory.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 16 December, 2005. <http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i17/17a01201.htm> 3 May, 2007.
Lisagor, Megan. “Theory: Still on the Table.” The University of Chicago Magazine: 96.3 (2004). <http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0402/features/theory.shtml> 4 March, 2007.
Mann, Paul. Theory-Death of the Avant-garde. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
Miller, J. Hillis. “The Function of Literary Theory at the Present Time.” Theory Now and Then. Durham, Duke UP, 1991. 385-93.
Orton, Fred and Griselda Pollock. “Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed.” Art History 4.3 (1981): 305-27.
Roche, Mark William. Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century. New Haven, Yale UP, 2004.
Watten, Barrett. The Constructivist Movement: from Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 2003.
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