Poetry of the Revolution (ebook)

Argumento de Poetry of the Revolution (ebook)

Poetry of the Revolution tells the story of political and artistic upheavals through the manifestos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ranging from the Communist Manifesto to the manifestos of the 1960s and beyond, it highlights the varied alliances and rivalries between socialism and repeated waves of avant-garde art. Martin Puchner argues that the manifesto--what Marx called the "poetry" of the revolution--was the genre through which modern culture articulated its revolutionary ambitions and desires. When it intruded into the sphere of art, the manifesto created an art in its own image: shrill and aggressive, political and polemical. The result was "manifesto art"--combinations of manifesto and art that fundamentally transformed the artistic landscape of the twentieth century.

Central to modern politics and art, the manifesto also measures the geography of modernity. The translations, editions, and adaptations of such texts as the Communist Manifesto and the Futurist Manifesto registered and advanced the spread of revolutionary modernity and of avant-garde movements across Europe and to the Americas. The rapid diffusion of these manifestos was made "possible by networks--such as the successive socialist internationals and international avant-garde movements--that connected Santiago and Zurich, Moscow and New York, London and Mexico City. Poetry of the Revolution thus provides the point of departure for a truly global analysis of modernism and modernity.

"From Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto down to the avant-garde theatre of the present, the manifesto is, as Martin Puchner demonstrates in this dazzling, brilliantly original, and deeply learned book, 'an act of self-foundation and self-creation,' unique in its exhortation to action, not by means of lofty principles but through its artistic form. In its fusion of the political and the poetic as they coexist in twentieth-century movements from Futurism to Situationism, Poetry of the Revolution is one of the few indispensable studies of the avant-garde. In a very crowded field, it stands out, quite simply, as a classic."--Marjorie Perloff, author of The Futurist Moment and The Vienna Paradox

"Martin Puchner navigates masterfully through the complex interactions between political and aesthetic manifestos. His account of the past, however, is also a call to renew and continue the work of manifestos in the future."--Michael Hardt, coauthor of Empire and Multitude

"Poetry of the Revolution is remarkable for its breadth of scholarship and its poised, authoritative style. It will stand for a long time as an authoritative history and elegant reinterpretation of the manifesto form. Few scholars have sustained a close and equal attention to the historical and formal trajectories of both the political manifesto and the aesthetic manifesto. Puchner does so with great scholarly brio, not only tracing the afterlife of the Communist Manifesto as a world text and a generic pioneer, but also bringing his considerable learning to bear on the forms and fates of a great number of avant-garde manifestos, from 1909 to 1999."--Jed Esty, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, author of A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England

"Martin Puchner has written a finely detailed, comparative, and well-researched history of the art manifesto in the twentieth century. Poetry of the Revolution makes an important contribution to our understanding of the place of the manifesto in modern culture, and it will be of considerable use not only to students of modern literature but also to students of twentieth-century art more generally."--Vincent Pecora, University of California, Los Angeles, author of Nations and Identities

"[A] bold venture into relatively unexplored terrain. Poetry of the Revolution is an intelligent and informative work, offering by far the best survey of its subject now available."--Kheya Bag, New Left Review0LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii
INTRODUCTION: Manifestos--Poetry of the Revolution 1

PART ONE: MARX AND THE MANIFESTO

CHAPTER 1: The Formation of a Genre 11
CHAPTER 2: Marxian Speech Acts 23
CHAPTER 3: The History of the Communist Manifesto 33
CHAPTER 4: The Geography of the Communist Manifesto 47

PART TWO: THE FUTURISM EFFECT

CHAPTER 5: Marinetti and the Avant-Garde Manifesto 69
CHAPTER 6: Russian Futurism and the Soviet State 94
CHAPTER 7: The Rear Guard of British Modernism 107

PART THREE: THE AVANT-GARDE AT LARGE

CHAPTER 8: Dada and the Internationalism of the Avant-Garde 135
CHAPTER 9: Huidobro's Creation of a Latin American Vanguard 166

PART FOUR: MAN I FESTOS AS MEANS AND END

CHAPTER 10: Surrealism,Latent and Manifest 179
CHAPTER 11: Artaud's Manifesto Theater 196

PART FIVE: A NEW POETRY FOR A NEW REVOLUTION

CHAPTER 12: The Manifesto in the Sixties 211
CHAPTER 13: Debord's Society of the Counterspectacle 220
CHAPTER 14: The Avant-Garde Is Dead:Long Live the Avant-Garde! 241

EPILOGUE: Poetry for the Future 259
NOTES 263
BIBLIOGRAPHY 295
INDEX 309