Utopia

David Ayers, Benedikt Hjartarson, Tomi Huttunen, Harri Veivo, David Ayers, Benedikt Hjartarson, Tomi Huttunen, Harri Veivo

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110433005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Utopian hope and dystopian despair are characteristic features of modernism and the avant-garde. Readings of the avant-garde have frequently sought to identify utopian moments coded in its works and activities as optimistic signs of a possible future social life, or as the attempt to preserve hope against the closure of an emergent dystopian present. The fourth volume of the EAM series, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, casts light on the history, theory and actuality of the utopian and dystopian strands which run through European modernism and the avant-garde from the late 19th to the 21st century.

The book's varied and carefully selected contributions, written by experts from around 20 countries, seek to answer such questions as:
· how have modernism and the avant-garde responded to historical circumstance in mapping the form of possible futures for humanity?
· how have avant-garde and modernist works presented ideals of living as alternatives to the present?
· how have avant-gardists acted with or against the state to remodel human life or to resist the instrumental reduction of life by administration and industrialisation?

Endnotes

1	David Burliuk et al., “From A Trap for Judges, 2”, in: Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (eds and trans.), Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, Ithaca and London 1988, 53–54, here 54.
2	Roland Schaer, “Utopia and Twentieth-Century Avant-Gardes”, in: Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (eds), Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, New York and Oxford 2000, 278–289, here 279.
3	Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al., Stanford, CA 2002, 165.
4	See: Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1984; Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, Stuttgart 1965.
5	First published in French translation in 1880 as Socialisme utopique et socialisme scientifique. The quotation is from: Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, trans. Aveling [un-credited], Moscow 1978, 49.
6	Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky, London 1925, 14.
7	Tyrus Miller, Modernism and the Frankfurt School, Edinburgh 2014, 21.
8	Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis 1997, 32.
9	Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society”, in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York 1991, 37–54, here 40.
10	Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London and New York 2005, 2.
11	Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, New York 1986, 172–173.
12	Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York 1995, 135.
13	Quoted in: David Pinder, Visions of the City: Utopianism and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism, Edinburgh 2005, 218.
14	Quoted in: George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers, Oxford 2012, 19.
15	Christina Lodder, “Searching for Utopia”, in: Christopher Wilk (ed.), Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–1939, London 2006, 23–40, here 31.
16	On the notion of pseudo-science and on the links between esotericism, Enlightenment and modern science, see for example: Dirk Rupnow et al. (eds), Pseudowissenschaft. Konzeptionen von Nichtwissenschaftlichkeit in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main 2008; Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, Renko Geffarth and Markus Meumann (eds), Aufklärung und Esoterik. Wege in die Moderne, Berlin and Boston 2013.
17	Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, London and New York 1973, 322.
18	Situationist International, “Questionnaire”, in: Ken Knabb (ed. and trans.), Situationist In.ternational Anthology, Berkeley 2006, 178–183, here 180. Originally published in: Internationale Situationniste, 1964, no. 9.
19	Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre and the Language of Rupture, Chicago 1986, 80–115.
20	Ricciotto Canudo, “Cerebrist Art”, trans. Emily Haves, in: Alex Danchev (ed.), 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, London 2011, 67–70, here 67. Original publication: “L’Art Cérébriste”, Le Figaro, 9 February 1914, 1–2.
21	Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes, Princeton 2006, 71.
22	Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution, 79.
23	F.T. Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism” [1909], trans. Doug Thompson, in: Danchev (ed.), 100 Artists’ Manifestos, 1–8, here 6.
24	Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 7.
25	Marjorie Perloff, Poetic License, Evanston 1990, 34.
26	Natalia Goncharova, “Letter to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1914)”, in: John E. Bowlt and Matthew Drutt (eds), Amazons of the Avant-Garde, New York 1999, 314.
27	Paul Mann, Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, Minneapolis 1991, 11.
28	Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 7.
29	Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 7.
30	André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)”, in: Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor 2010, 3–47, here 47.
31	Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism”, 14.
32	Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism”, 5, 9.
33	I have written more extensively on the connections between French and English Romanti-cisms and Surrealisms in: “The Peculiar Rom...