Suchergebnisse

Literature struggles in South Africa—or, struggles of interpretation?—evince, and continue to evince, a thematic and stylistic impulse to belong to a common society, but, paradoxically, a society that is often more disjunctive than conjunctive. How, then, to belong? I trace the trajectory from the black-and-white voices of the 1970s to a more heterogeneous conception of the society, after apartheid, and particularly over the last decade, or so. What is peculiar about literature struggles is that the heroic mode has played a relatively marginal role in sense-making or imaginative projection; rather, the critical insight ensures that political language—too often crude in its singularities of either/or—has seldom enjoyed the unalloyed assent of literary language. Considerations of nation-building hardly feature alongside the concerns of living in a functioning society.

In his 1974 work, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger developed a sociological argument that the practices of the historical avant-garde had emerged as a fusion of art and life, merging practices into a hybrid assault on autonomy that can be characterized as distinctly avant-garde. Refuting previous positions, Bürger argued that the avant-garde wasn't concerned with merely dismantling the classifications of art, but the institution of art in its entirety. This was dramatically opposed to Clement Greenberg's hegemonic theory of art practice, where the segregated medium was the sole attribute through which the avant-garde could advance. It was in opposition to this diffusion of art practice that Bürger's theory framed a radicalized lens through which the avant-garde could be reconceptualised: combatting the segregation of medium with a deliberate fusing of the structures of art and their political and social histories. This paper will look at the significant role fusion, as a strategy, plays in Bürger's seminal work and its reception. It is the recognition of fusion as an oppositional system in art production that not only distinguishes his approach from early incarnations of modernism, but has also seen the extension of his work into ongoing critical projects in art theory in America, which have radicalised fusion as a critical and creative practice.

Commentators have either ignored American supporters of General Franco's Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) or dismissed them as cranks. In reality, the pro-Franco cause was both more widespread and more complex than prevailing historiography allows. Many Franco supporters were also anti-fascists and supporters in other respects of progressive causes. This article examines Ellery Sedgwick's support of Franco. Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, one of the leading journals of opinion at the time, Sedgwick was also representative of the American social élite. The article argues that Sedgwick was not interested in Franco per se, but promoted his cause because he sought to demonstrate the danger that international communism posed to American national identity during a period of unprecedented insecurity. Caught in a unique historical moment, pro-Franco anti-communists of 1938 were patriots to themselves but un-American to the New Deal state.