A Hundred Years of Avant-Gardes - Avant-Garde Critical Studies Hardcover

About the Book

The volume contains 22 chapters, comprising analyses of representative cases of literary experimentation in Poland, together with comparative studies of selected works from Central Europe and elsewhere.

Book Synopsis

For many Central-European countries, the inter- and post-war periods marked the beginning of their statehood and entailed the laying of the foundations for literary language itself. Experimental tendencies became a laboratory of bold and ambiguous visions of the world, inspiring many artists to join in the process of rebuilding their communities. Unlike other parts of the world, in Poland experiments thus conceived were not just about contesting bourgeois habits and forms, or testing the boundaries of social and aesthetic conventions. On the contrary, revolutionary-oriented circles supported the building of new centres of intellectual life, joined the cultural mainstream in the broadest possible sense, and, with time, became an important point of reference for the entire panorama of literary and artistic life.

About the Author

Katarzyna Bazarnik, PhD (D.Litt.) is professor in the Institute of English Philology of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Her research interests include materiality of literature, experimental and avant-garde writing, and Irish studies. She has published on James Joyce, B.S. Johnson, and liberature, an intermedial literary genre, combining text with the material form of the book (Lat. liber) into an integral whole.

Agnieszka Karpowicz, PhD (D.Litt.) is professor of the University of Warsaw, Poland. She is a specialist in literature and culture and member of the Centre for Avant-Garde Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and Modernitas, the Maison des Sciences Humaines of the Université libre de Bruxelles.

Honorata Sroka, PhD is assistant professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is the PI of several research projects and the author of articles on avant-garde archives, self-historicization and experimental life writing (projects funded by the National Science Centre Poland, the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange, the Centre français de recherche en sciences sociales and Charles University in Prague).

Paulina Chorzewska-Rubik, PhD is a literary scholar specializing in the connections between literature, new media, and internet culture. She is the principal investigator of the grant "Poem on the Web: Web Philology - The Example of Tomasz Pulka's Creative Work (2005-2012)," funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, and affiliated with the University of Warsaw.

Jakub Kornhauser, PhD is assistant professor at the Faculty of Philology, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He is a literary scholar, poet, translator, essayist, editor and performer. He is the co-founder of the Avant-Garde Studies Center at the Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University.