The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies)

By Krzysztof Ziarek

Book Overview

In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek explores, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the major critics of modernity (Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization.

The four poets Ziarek considers--Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Biaoszewski, and Susan Howe--demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics. Moreover, this quartet illustrates how the main operative concepts and strategies of the avant-garde underpinned the practices of canonical writers. A profound philosophical meditation on language, modernity, and the everyday, The Historicity of Experience offers a fundamental reconceptualization of the avant-garde in relation to experience.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081011836X
• ISBN13: 9780810118362
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Length: 355 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.9"