Alfred Jarry was a French symbolist writer who is best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), often cited as a forerunner of the Dada, Surrealist, and Futurist movements of the 1920s and 1930s and later the Theatre of the absurd In the 1950s and 1960s He also coined the term and philosophical concept of 'pataphysics.
In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde identifies an experimental genre, or work of art, and the artist who created it; which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.
Dreamcatcher is a 2001 science fiction horror novel by American writer Stephen King, featuring elements of body horror, suspense and alien invasion. The book, written in cursive, helped the author recuperate from a 1999 car accident, and was completed in half a year. According to the author in his afterword, the working title was Cancer. His wife, Tabitha King, persuaded him to change the title. A film adaptation was released in 2003.
Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2023, Powers has published thirteen novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell was a British poet and critic and the eldest of the three literary Sitwells. She reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents and lived much of her life with her governess. She never married but became passionately attached to Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle, to whom she was generous and helpful.
The House of the Spirits is the debut novel of Isabel Allende. The novel was rejected by several Spanish-language publishers before being published in Buenos Aires in 1982. It became an instant best-seller, was critically acclaimed, and catapulted Allende to literary stardom. The novel was named Best Novel of the Year in Chile in 1982, and Allende received the country's Panorama Literario award. The House of the Spirits has been translated into over 20 languages.
The Man with One Red Shoe is a 1985 American comedy film directed by Stan Dragoti and starring Tom Hanks and Dabney Coleman. It is a remake of the 1972 French film The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe starring Pierre Richard and Mireille Darc.
Herwarth Walden was a German expressionist artist and art expert in many disciplines. He is broadly acknowledged as one of the most important discoverers and promoters of German avant-garde art in the early twentieth century. He was best known as the founder of the Expressionist magazine Der Sturm and its offshoots.
Matthew Causey is an American academic, film and theatre maker, singer-songwriter and actor. He is associate professor at Trinity College, Dublin and director of the Arts Technology Research Laboratory in the School of Drama, Film and Music. He received his PhD in Drama from Stanford University, where he wrote, produced, and performed in his trilogy of plays, The History of the Avant-Garde.
Lajos Kassák was a Hungarian poet, novelist, painter, essayist, editor, theoretician of the avant-garde, and occasional translator. He was among the first genuine working-class writers in Hungarian literature.
All That Fall is a one-act radio play by Samuel Beckett produced following a request from the BBC. It was written in English and completed in September 1956. The autograph copy is titled Lovely Day for the Races. It was published in French, in a translation by Robert Pinget revised by Beckett himself, as Tous ceux qui tombent.
Steve Kurtz is an American artist and co-founder of the art collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). His work with CAE is considered pioneering in the areas of politically engaged art, interventionist practices, and cultural research and action in the field of biotechnology and ecological struggle. He is also a writer and educator.
The ancient legend of Orpheus and Eurydice concerns the fateful love of Orpheus of Thrace for the beautiful Eurydice. Orpheus was the son of Oeagrus and the muse Calliope. It may be a late addition to the Orpheus myths, as the latter cult-title suggests those attached to Persephone. The subject is among the most frequently retold of all Greek myths, being featured in numerous works of literature, operas, ballets, paintings, plays, musicals, and more recently, films and video games.
Anton Podbevšek was a Slovenian avant-garde poet. He was an important influence to the poet Srečko Kosovel. He was one of the participants of the artistic activity known as the Novo Mesto Spring in 1920, which marked the beginning of Slovenian modernism. The poet Miran Jarc portrayed him in the semi-autobiographical novel Novo mesto in the character of Andrej Vrezec.
The Copper Beech is a 1992 novel by the Irish author Maeve Binchy. Set in the 1950s and 1960s, the storyline follows the lives of eight characters and those closest to them living in a small Irish town, in chapters with interlocking plot elements. Reviews are positive about this novel with an unusual structure.
The Gray Cloth with Ten Percent White: A Ladies' Novel is an avant-garde novel by the fantasist and visionary writer Paul Scheerbart, first published in 1914. The book expresses its author's commitment to the use of glass in modern architecture, which had a significant impact on the concepts of German Expressionism.
Homefront is a 2013 American action thriller film directed by Gary Fleder and written by Sylvester Stallone, who also produced the film with Kevin King Templeton and John Thompson. The film was released nationwide in theaters on November 27, 2013. The film is based on the 2005 novel Homefront by Chuck Logan. The film stars Jason Statham, James Franco, Winona Ryder, and Kate Bosworth. Filming began on October 1, 2012 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Núria Perpinyà Filella is a Catalan novelist, a playwright and an essayist. Senior Lecturer in Theory and Comparative Literature at the university of Lleida in Catalonia, Spain. Her novels deal with unusual topics and are characterized by their intellectual irony, formal rigor and experimentalism. In her books, she defends the philosophy of Perspectivism and reflects on the fact that the phenomena have multiple interpretations. Her creative work is written in Catalan, but most of the essays are published in Spanish or in English.
Avant-pop is popular music that is experimental, new, and distinct from previous styles while retaining an immediate accessibility for the listener. The term implies a combination of avant-garde sensibilities with existing elements from popular music in the service of novel or idiosyncratic artistic visions.
Walden, originally titled Diaries, Notes and Sketches , is a 1968 American film by experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas. After several years of filming everyday scenes from his life, Mekas was commissioned by the Albright–Knox Art Gallery to make Walden. It was his first major diary film, and he named it after Henry David Thoreau's 1854 memoir Walden. Mekas's film has received acclaim as a work of avant-garde cinema.
