This book focuses on the integral, interdisciplinary, and
intermedial "compositions"--verbal, visual, musical, theatrical,
and cinematic--of the avant-gardes in the period following World
War II. It also considers the artistic politics of these postwar
avant-gardes and their works. The book's geographical span is
primarily the United States, although in its more extended reach,
it comprehends an international context of American postwar
cultural hegemony throughout what was once referred to as "the free
world."
The works and the artists Miller takes up are those of the
so-called "neo-avant-garde" with its inherent contradiction: an
avant-garde whose newness is defined by its seeming reiteration of
an earlier historical formation. Concentrating on the rhetorical,
contextual, and performative characteristic of neo-avant-garde
practice, including its relation to politics, Miller emphasizes the
centrality of the example in this practice. John Cage, Jackson Mac
Low, Gilbert Sorrentino, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, and Samuel
Beckett are among the artists whose exemplary works feature in
"Singular Examples." Miller's key readings of these major artists
of the period open up some of the most difficult texts of the
neo-avant-garde even as they contribute to an eloquent argument for
"artistic politics." Underlining the relation between material
particulars and their thematic implications, between particular
works and larger theoretical claims, between avant-garde aesthetics
and formalist analysis, "Singular Examples" is exemplary in its own
right, revealing the ultimate shape and direction of a postwar
avant-garde contending with the historical predicaments of radical
modernism.
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