The Integrity of the Avant-Garde: Karel Teige and the Biography of an Ambition

Please join us for the book launch of The Integrity of the Avant-Garde: Karel Teige and the Biography of an Ambition.

On what grounds do we speak of ’the avant-garde’ in interwar European culture? Why do we understand the conflicts and quarrels among these diverse movements as expressing a shared attitude—the culture of the manifesto, the drive to reject, to explore, to renew—that trumps the conflicts and quarrels themselves? Why do the stern rationalism of a functionalist building and the irreverent irrationalism of a Dadaist performance seem heralds of a similar spirit? The Czech avant-garde art theorist Karel Teige (1900-1951) regarded architecture and film as providing the key to formulating a unified theory that would capture this ‘integrity of the avant-garde’. Teige—whose thought has many points of contact with celebrated figures such as Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin, and who was a close associate of Le Corbusier, André Breton, and Hannes Meyer—reveals how a vibrant ‘alternative’ avant-garde tradition can raise central questions for understanding European modernism. Peter Zusi is Associate Professor of Czech and Comparative Literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.

Author

Peter Zusi is Associate Professor of Czech and Comparative Literature at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. His interests range across modern Czech, German, and central European literature and culture, with particular interest in the theory of modernism and the avant-garde and the relation between literature and visual culture. He is co-editor of the FRINGE Series at UCL Press, and is currently working on a book on Kafka and Czech modernism.

Speakers

Dr Tim Beasley-Murray, Associate Professor of European Thought and Culture (UCL)

Prof. Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature (QMUL)

Dr Klara Kemp-Welch, Reader in 20th-Century Modernism (Courtauld Institute of Art)