100012 VO Lecture course: Modern German Literature: Avant-garde - Dynamisation of Arts (2015S)

The label avant-garde is about to become the central concept of 20th century art, at least for some of its agglomerations in the periods from the tenths to the thirties and from the fifties to the seventies. This label can denote an epochal classification as well as a systematic determination of an artistic attitude. Both concepts are closely entangled and shall be examined by reference to significant examples in different arts.
The concept of avant-garde as a formative force cannot be clarified by definition, it has to be deduced from single phenomena. The lecture series will explore the following explanatory models:
- the concentration of different arts on their respective materials and mediality (whereby the meaning of the concepts material, medium, and form has to be explained)
- the intermediality of arts and the cooperation of artists (visual and performing arts, music, literature, film, fashion, etc.) as a constitutive factor of avant-garde
- the dissolution of the concept of (organic) artwork
- the relation between avant-garde, (art-) history, modernism, and post-avant-garde
- the dissolution of the category „art“ altogether, avant-garde artists changing sides from arts to sciences (as "renegade scientists"), but also to political or anarchistic activism
- art as an explanatory approach to phenomena that cannot be explained by sciences
- the role group formation, manifestos, personal confessions, and self-conceptions play for the avant-garde, the genealogical aspiration that can be found in the archives of the avant-garde
- the socio-historical and economical preconditions that lead to the emergence of avant-garde, and vice versa, the socio-historical impacts of the avant-garde
- avant-garde, or the end of avant-garde?
In the course of the lecture series, international and national scholars will deal with these and related questions. We will especially focus on phenomena of Viennese post-war avant-garde. We suppose that many of the well known movements in the US, in France, Great Britain, Germany, etc. were preformed in the Viennese avant-garde – as a pre-avant-garde, as a prototype of avant-garde.