The work of avant-garde auteurs from the mid-twentieth century onward is a testament not only to Pirandello’s ongoing influence but to the ways artists continue to break open fresh paths, building on Pirandello’s aesthetic. Through the destabilization of day-to-day existence, especially in his theatre trilogy – Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Each in His Own Way (1924), and Tonight We Improvise (1930) – Pirandello shatters every kind of theatrical binary. Out of these eruptions, a sense of the postmodern emerges, evoked via the experience of a messy, chaotic collaborative process that culminates in an “anti-play” filled with seemingly random and often sinister playfulness. This essay closely examines the processes and performances of the Living Theatre’s (New York, 1959) and Robert Brustein’s American Repertory Theatre (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987) productions of Tonight We Improvise. John Jesurun and Takeshi Kawamura’s Distant Observer: Tokyo/New York Correspondence at La MaMa (New York, 2018) is the next focal point – only one of many current transmittals of Pirandello’s genius, moving forward.

This chapter examines the way in which the idea of a European avant-garde is formed in the wake of Messiaen’s thought and the ways in which this reflexively informed Messiaen’s own work. It focuses in particular on the theoretical achievements of Ligeti, Stockhausen, and Xenakis and how formed a new ways of thinking about music.

Drone metal is an extremely slow and extended subgenre of metal, developing since the 1990s at the margins of metal and experimental music scenes. Influences include minimalist composers, Indian ragas and contemporary artists alongside Black Sabbath. This echoed earlier metal musicians’ appeals to the elevated cultural status of baroque musicians in response to stereotypes of metal culture as stupid and unskilled, which often revealed class snobbery about metal’s perceived audiences. This chapter examines drone metal as a metal avant-garde, analysing how it has been received outside metal culture, and how coverage of this marginal subgenre might affect perceptions of metal music overall. Taking jazz and experimental music magazine The Wire as a case study, the chapter describes that magazine’s reproduction of stereotypes about metal until the 2000s, when it began to cover drone metal. Thereafter the magazine became more positive about metal in general, even describing it as always having been experimental. This revisionism is particularly evident in The Wire’s repeated use of an alchemical metaphor to describe drone metal as turning ‘base metal’ into avant-garde gold.

Chapter 2 introduces the case study at the heart of this book, the Theater an der Ruhr, and traces its institutional formation in the post-industrial Ruhr valley. This chapter builds on archival material and fieldwork in the archives of the Theater an der Ruhr in the theatre studies collection on Schloss Wahn in Cologne, suggesting new ways for combining ethnographic and historiographic methods for studying the institutionalisation of theatres. Documenting how its founders negotiated federal patrons and municipal funding, this chapter explores the political economy of public theatres and how they articulate their own forms of ‘artistic critique’ against the economisation of cultural production (Boltanski and Chiapello[1999]). It also describes, on the basis of a series of interviews and founding contracts and critical reception at the time, how and why the founders of the Theater an der Ruhr created an institutional structure that facilitates long phases of rehearsals, analysing its underpinning by an avant-garde understanding of ‘autonomous artistic creation’ irreducible to profit.

This chapter explores the contribution made to American modernism by the “little magazine” format in the period from the late nineteenth century through to the middle of the twentieth century. It focuses upon three key examples: The Little Review (1914–29), edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap; Broom (1921–4), founded by Harold Loeb; and Partisan Review (1934–2003), first edited by Wallace Phillips and Philip Rahv. The chapter explores the transnational connections articulated by each magazine, demonstrating in particular how questions of the relationship between the avant-garde and politics dominated their contributions to American modernism.

Why is conceptualizing an American avant-garde particularly problematic? How productive is the term “avant-garde” for understanding the development of American modernism? As a concept, the “avant-garde” was defined almost entirely by theorists affiliated in various ways with the Frankfurt School using examples and with political expectations forged in western Europe. Various political and historical assumptions led to theories framing American modernist aesthetics as an impoverished variant of the European model. This chapter begins with a survey of some important theories of the avant-garde before considering the classic American modernist avant-garde – the years 1914–17 in Greenwich Village, New York City – as a case study, using poet William Carlos Williams as its touchstone. Evaluated from the perspective of European accounts, it suggests some limitations to the predominantly European framework of the avant-garde in illuminating American modernism with the example of another American poet: Hart Crane.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

The mode of writing with which Rushdie’s work has most often been associated is magic realism. Critics have compared his oeuvre with those of South American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. This chapter explores Rushdie’s engagement with realism beyond South American literary traditions, re-engaging with the art-historical mode of magic realism conceived in Germany in the 1920s. Rushdie’s conceptual approach to space, place, and time is deeply rooted in a visual literacy that aligns with the mysterious paintings of magic realism, as well as drawing on the technical magic of photography and cinema. This focus enables stronger connections to be made between art, visual cultures, and Rushdie’s geopolitical realism, reinvesting criticality in the mode and discourse of literary magic realism.

Lindsay Ceballos examines the circles of avant-garde Russian poets who grew up alongside Chekhov’s writing and who saw in Chekhov – among many other qualities – a “realist” antagonist, fellow symbolist, “poet of despair,” paragon of moral fortitude, and ultimately a larger-than-life embodiment of the Russian cultural edifice at the turn of the century.

This chapter deals with the history of the French poetry of the First Wold War. Although, like in other belligerent countries, the production of war poetry was massive between 1914 and 1918, it remains hitherto neglected by literature scholars and historians. The genre suffered from its bad reputation. Apart from a few avant-gardists like Guillaume Apollinaire, the scholarly consensus outlined the French war poetry as a chauvinistic old-fashioned flood of words with no literary or even documentary relevance in contrast with the prose written by soldier-writers. This chapter does not try to rehabilitate the French war poetry but to sketch a typology of a significative cultural phenomenon. It shows the variety of the genre between patriotism, eulogy, irony and humour, testimony, protest, and formal research.

Guillaume Apollinaire is without doubt the most prolific French poet of the Great War. In addition to his major poetry collection, Calligrammes (1918), he wrote and published plays, stories, journalism, and criticism during the conflict. His writing is nothing if not wide ranging.He considered poetry a spiritual activity and an escape from the traditional classification of genre. He also believed there was no boundary between art and life – the two are inextricably linked – and, further, that art and life transform one another.This porous nature, not without its ambivalences and paradoxes, constitutes a major key to the interpretation of his work. The diversity and originality of his oeuvre, the trajectory of the author and the importance of his legacy help to explain how and why he became a poet of war in France, a country that ignored the tradition of 'war poets' that had developed in Great Britain.

Critical accounts of the modes in which modernist poetry responds to the First World War continue to place an emphasis on men’s responses to war, either non-combatants such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, or those who served, among them Richard Aldington and Wyndham Lewis. This chapter does consider the men of the poetic avant-garde but also focuses on women of the avant-garde – H.D., Marianne Moore, Mina Loy and Juliette Roche – to unearth the generative impact of the First World War on their poetry. As this chapter explores, the war features as subject matter and stimulus for the poetries of modernism and in the pages of modernist magazines, generating new forms and perspectives alongside the vivid expressions of anger, trauma, loss, and disillusionment. However, as this chapter also argues, women poets wrote the conflict differently; in confronting both patriarchal and military violence, the First World War became a key impetus for their feminist avant-garde poetic.

Belgium was a casus belli for the Great War in 1914 and its post-war fate was part of president Wilson’s Fourteen Points, yet there is no such thing as a Belgian canon of First World War poetry. Famous civilian poets like Émile Verhaeren were hailed in Allied propaganda, but their wartime verse is largely forgotten. Poems written in Flemish (a local variant of Dutch) are hardly ever read in the Francophone part of the country. The war and many of the Flemish poems written about it testify of a gradual crumbling of Belgian unity. Paul van Ostaijen’s 1921 Bezette Stad (Occupied City, also translated into English, French and German) is a powerful example of avant-garde typography but it is also a testament to the radical Flemish activists who, during the course of the war, started to despise their native Belgium even more than they did the German occupier. Those wounds have never really healed.

Bolaño’s work in the nineties shows him conscious of the harm that has been done to an entire generation and to the psyche of Chile. His preoccupation with the Chilean situation connects with his interest in writing fiction that recounts that loss, along with the establishment of the central pieces of the new economic world order. For him, the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) unleashes energies associated with a new world map in which the American continent is key to the necropolitics of the end of the century. Bolaño will become the main Latin American author of this period marked by multilateralism, though he is certainly not alone (a central characteristic of Latin American literature of the end of the century is a desire to become global.) Much of what he wrote in the second half of the nineties is an inquiry into Chile’s Pinochet which shows the pervasiveness of evil and the bitter conclusion the neoliberal trend has consolidated. Bolaño’s fame explodes with the publication of The Savage Detectives, which can be read as an instruction manual for contending with the market without making concessions.

According to Carpentier, Columbus rounded, rounded off, and rounded up the planet at a very high cost for the Indigenous cultures of nuestra América (our America). Gradually, a new culture emerged from all the possible hybridizations of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Carpentier also stated that, in order for the novel to exist, there had to be a tradition: the first narratives were for domestic consumption, and it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the avalanche began with El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) and Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps). It was in effect the return to Europe of the galleons that once left Palos de Moguer in Spain, but now carrying another, different, culture. Several factors contributed to Carpentier’s awakening in postwar Europe: the dominance of fiction, somewhat exhausted by the weight of tradition and tired avant-garde formulas, was supplemented by a growing interest in the documentary, thanks to advances in photography and printing. Meanwhile, in Latin America a new approach to the novel was generated via storytelling, linking the particular to the universal. The historical novel was transformed and now demonstrated, alongside an only partially explored physical world, the questions that preoccupy all humankind.

In the prologue to his novel Serafim Ponte Grande (1933), Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade wrote: “The modernista movement, which gave way to the ‘anthropophagic’ virus, seemed to indicate an advanced phenomenon. São Paulo possessed a powerful industry. Who could say that the rise of coffee couldn’t bring that semi-colonial, nouveau riche literature to the level of those costly imperialist surrealisms?” How did Latin American artists and writers relate to the profound political and economic changes that took place at the end of the 1920s? This chapter looks at Latin America’s cosmopolitan avant-garde’s rejection, incorporation, or support of the emerging internationalism triggered by the global rise of communism. It does so by examining two events: Diego Rivera’s trips to the Soviet Union and the United States, and the experience of the Brazilian Anthropophagic movement seen from the perspective of Oswald de Andrade’s transformation from cosmopolitan poet to internationalist activist.

According to Carpentier, Columbus rounded, rounded off, and rounded up the planet at a very high cost for the Indigenous cultures of nuestra América (our America). Gradually, a new culture emerged from all the possible hybridizations of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Carpentier also stated that, in order for the novel to exist, there had to be a tradition: the first narratives were for domestic consumption, and it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the avalanche began with El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) and Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps). It was in effect the return to Europe of the galleons that once left Palos de Moguer in Spain, but now carrying another, different, culture. Several factors contributed to Carpentier’s awakening in postwar Europe: the dominance of fiction, somewhat exhausted by the weight of tradition and tired avant-garde formulas, was supplemented by a growing interest in the documentary, thanks to advances in photography and printing. Meanwhile, in Latin America a new approach to the novel was generated via storytelling, linking the particular to the universal. The historical novel was transformed and now demonstrated, alongside an only partially explored physical world, the questions that preoccupy all humankind.

This chapter comparatively probes the distinct trajectories of avant-garde poetics in Spanish America and Brazil from the postwar to the 1980s. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the rise of the Spanish American Vanguardias and Brazilian Modernismo, which adapted European experimental vocabularies to local contexts. Subsequently, a revival of the utopian avant-garde impulse developed into singular and divergent poetic forms of expression. This divergence can be clearly seen in, among other things, the preference in Brazil for synthetic forms and in Spanish America for the long poem. In other cases, the traditions converged in the adoption of an anti-lyrical stance, constructivist concerns, the use of long forms, and politically engaged poetry. From the 1970s on, the neo-baroque aesthetic also brought together figures from the entire region. This chapter looks at these divergences as well as points of confluence, seeking to understand how, in general, the reception of Surrealism and other poetic traditions led to a more “discursive,” personal poetry, and how the foregrounding of the materiality of language fueled synthetic, non-discursive forms.

This chapter comparatively probes the distinct trajectories of avant-garde poetics in Spanish America and Brazil from the postwar to the 1980s. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the rise of the Spanish American Vanguardias and Brazilian Modernismo, which adapted European experimental vocabularies to local contexts. Subsequently, a revival of the utopian avant-garde impulse developed into singular and divergent poetic forms of expression. This divergence can be clearly seen in, among other things, the preference in Brazil for synthetic forms and in Spanish America for the long poem. In other cases, the traditions converged in the adoption of an anti-lyrical stance, constructivist concerns, the use of long forms, and politically engaged poetry. From the 1970s on, the neo-baroque aesthetic also brought together figures from the entire region. This chapter looks at these divergences as well as points of confluence, seeking to understand how, in general, the reception of Surrealism and other poetic traditions led to a more “discursive,” personal poetry, and how the foregrounding of the materiality of language fueled synthetic, non-discursive forms.

Langston Hughes’s association with Chicago as a nexus for modernism was clearly marked in 1926, when he published four poems in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a leading journal for avant-garde poetry in the English-speaking world. This analysis considers how geocultural contexts in Chicago figured in the development of Hughes’s engagements with modernism. Examining Hughes’s jazz and blues poetry of the 1920s in light of his response to formal innovations by Chicago Renaissance poets such as Carl Sandburg as well as “high” modernists such as T. S. Eliot, I also explore how his critical engagement with Ezra Pound’s imagist poetics was shaped by the prior examples of Sandburg and Jean Toomer, and conclude with a discussion of how Hughes’s literary collaboration with Chicago luminaries such as Richard Wright and his mentorship of Gwendolyn Brooks played an important role in the creative flowering of the Black Chicago Renaissance.