European Review
- European Review / Volume 19 / Issue 02 / April 2011, pp 321-328
- Copyright © Academia Europaea 2011
- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S106279871000058X (About DOI), Published online: 14 April 2011
Focus: Avant-garde/Arriere-garde
An Avant-garde for Today: ‘the Ally of its Own Gravediggers’? Some Thoughts on Apollinaire and Kundera
Timothy Mathewsa1
a1 University College London, UK. E-mail: t.mathews@ucl.ac.uk
Abstract
This essay is concerned with the power of art to effect change, but also to show attachments to existing ways of understanding. Avant-garde art from Cubism to Surrealism seeks to transform the shapes in which we see the world. But change may simply create blindness to the past, and to what is, and to the way our chains are yanked by the lures of domination whether economic, social or emotional. Kundera's novelistic meditation on the canonical and radical poets Rimbaud and Éluard encourages us to wonder whether the obsession with change is an investment in the powers of oblivion and ignorance.
(Online publication April 14 2011)
