Second call for papers - deadline extended by 2 weeks

Examining the Avant Garde
A Graduate Conference
October 16 and 17, 2008
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

What is the avant garde? Does it have an expiration date? Peter Bürger and
others have argued that avant garde movements such as Dadaism, Futurism,
Constructivism, and Surrealism responded to and broke with what was deemed a
socially and politically detached art establishment. According to the avant
gardes themselves, both left and right, this brief period in the early 20th
century was marked by its revolutionary potential. Through the performative
language of the manifesto and the radical mixing of styles and media, the
avant gardes articulated their positions on political modernity and
aesthetic modernism as acts of rupture and renewal. Detached from these
specific movements, though, the term avant garde stands not so much for a
particular aesthetic engagement as it does for an inquiry into art's social
function and political potential, an acknowledgement of art's historicity,
its representational and medial experimentation, and the possibility of its
renewal. In this conference we propose to explore this extremely rich
terrain called "avant garde" by examining the genealogy and construction
of the historical phenomena and considering the possibility of vanguardist
positions now in the European context, with particular attention to the
German-speaking countries.

We invite graduate students from all disciplines to submit proposals for
20-minute papers exploring the meaning, origins, and afterlife of the avant
garde, as well as its epistemological and critical potential. Possible
topics include:
The history and meanings of autonomous and engaged art
Proto-avant gardes
Reconsiderations of the historical avant garde
The relationship between the avant garde, modernism, and postmodernism
Contemporary concepts of the relation between the aesthetic and the
political
Neo-avant garde and counter-avant garde forms
Recuperations of the avant garde in contemporary art and letters
Avant garde/vanguardism through the lens of gender, race, sexuality
* Avant garde, art-historical knowledge, and the processes of
canon-formation

Forward abstracts of no more than 300 words in English to
avantgardeumich.edu by August 1st, 2008.