Stephanie Anderson Reviews Sophie Seita's Provisional Avant-Gardes

Poet and scholar Stephanie Anderson reviews Sophie Seita's first monograph, Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital (Stanford University Press, 2019), for Critical Inquiry. "How might we read little magazines as both exemplary and as deeply contextual?" asks Anderson. "What is the work of describing sociality without making it all about dinner parties and gossip?" More:

As evidenced by the title, the book begins by arguing that avant-gardes are provisional in practice and in discourse. As a “discursive and malleable construct,” she writes, “the avant-garde is what is called avant-garde” (p. 16). An argument about provisionality is a little like squinting through mist—it becomes hard to see the edges. Seita’s answer to this problem is multifaceted: she advocates for multiple definitions, promotes description and context, and clusters together genres of characteristics. She uses the term “proto-form,” from Mina Loy, as an umbrella category for all things provisional that might be affiliated with the avant-garde (“media, genres, and groups” [p. 3]). As if anticipating the criticism that the argument is at times elusive or tautological, the prose is refreshingly direct...

Read on at Critical Inquiry.