Avant-garde against institutionalization: “China’s university revolution” during Great Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) from the perspective of Tel Quel intellectuals

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Kefei Xu
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Tel Quel

A First Homage

2018 ◽  
pp. 362-369
Author(s):  
Christophe Bident
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Tel Quel

Looks at a special issue of the journal Critique, produced in homage to Blanchot in 1966. The chapter goes on to detail the relations between Blanchot and various theoreticians and avant-garde thinkers of the late 1960s, for instance Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and the Tel Quel group.

Tel Quel School

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Heath
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Tel Quel ◽  
Social Ordering ◽  
Philippe Sollers ◽  
Literary Practices ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Given

Tel Quel was a review published in Paris from 1960 to 1982. Under the direction of Philippe Sollers, it became a key source of avant-garde work in literature and critical theory. Concerned with the relations between art and politics, the Tel Quel group drew on semiotics, psychoanalysis and Marxism as the bases for an overall theory that would establish writing – écriture – as having its own specific and necessary revolutionary force. Influential in its emphasis on literary practices seen as breaking with the given social ordering of ‘reality’ and ‘subject’ (the ‘limit-texts’ of writers such as Sade or Artaud), the review emphasized textuality, the condition of all fields of knowledge as textual productions. Less a coherent school of thought than a site of shifting theoretical-political interventions and new explorations in writing, Tel Quel was at its most powerful in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

scholarly journals History Writ Large: Big-character Posters, Red Logorrhoea and the Art of Words

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Geremie R. Barmé
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Chinese Character ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Word Images ◽  
Mao Era ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The starting point of this paper is the 1986 artwork of the then Xiamen-based artist Wu Shanzhuan, called ‘Red Humor’, which reworked references to big-character posters (dazi bao 大字报) and other Mao-era forms of political discourse, recalling the Cultural Revolution. It explains how Wu’s installation offered a provocative microcosm of the overwhelming mood engendered by a logocentric movement to ‘paint the nation red’ with word-images during the years 1966-1967. This discussion of the hyper-real use of the dazi bao during China’s Cultural Revolution era (c.1964-1978) allows us to probe into ‘the legacies of the word made image’ in modern China. The paper argues that, since the 1980s, Wu Shanzhuan has had many emulators and ‘avant-garde successors’, since we have seen multiple examples of parodic deconstructions of the cultural authority of the Chinese character (zi) in recent decades.

From the ruins of heaven on earth

Above Sea ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 26-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Lin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Shopping Mall ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
Cultural Conflicts ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Heritage Site ◽  
Revolutionary Art ◽  
Design Experiments

Chapter One examines pastiche in the shopping mall and cultural heritage site Xintiandi, before discussing the site’s buried modern art histories marred by cross-cultural conflicts. Xintiandi physically surrounds China’s first communist meeting site of 1921, today memorialized as a museum. The complex was designed with reference to the vernacular homes of its formerly foreign occupied French Concession setting, and is officially celebrated for its “East-meets-West” and “Old-meets-New” architecture, even while the construction demolished most of the site’s existing homes and dislocated thousands of working class residents. This chapter analyzes how Xintiandi’s seemingly benign East-meets-West façades mask collusions between the Chinese Communist Party’s autocratic state power and capitalist development, while romanticizing Shanghai’s modern cosmopolitan legacy. The chapter analyzes examples of Xintiandi’s repressed cultural histories, including the revolutionary art and design experiments of Pang Xunqin, founder of the 1930s avant-garde collective, The Storm Society, leftist writings and art promoted by Lu Xun, and the major Cultural Revolution Era debate sparked by Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1972 documentary, Chung Kuo Cina. The chapter argues that the official admonishment of Shanghai-based cultural projects by Pang and Antonioni speak to collisions between Shanghai’s semi-colonial past, Maoist socialism, and Cultural Revolution Era totalitarianism that still resonate in Shanghai today.

Review. The Making of an Avant-Garde: 'Tel Quel'. Kauppi, Niilo

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-237
Author(s):  
P. F. FFRENCH
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Tel Quel

Age of Genius or Century of Revolution? Russian Culture and Power Across the High-Low Divide, 1850–1950

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 239-253
Author(s):  
Michael David-Fox
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Cultural System ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Masses

Abstract This article discusses Jeffrey Brooks’ metaphor of an integrated ecosystem to describe Russian cultural history in the late imperial and early Soviet periods. Brooks’s Firebird and the Fox describes an interlocking cultural system marked by high-low interactions, as a rich Russian folkloric tradition based on fable and popular tales was reworked with remarkable creativity in what he calls an “age of genius.” In response, this article argues that this period of Russian cultural creativity can be seen as coinciding with the extended life-cycle of the Russian Revolution. The subversive, satirical humor and irony running through Brooks’s cultural “play-sphere” was complemented by another tradition: a didactic, instructional, enlightening “teach-sphere” that animated a wide range of intelligentsia and cultural forces shaping cultural evolution and cultural revolution. If the play-sphere highlights the rebellious distance between culture and power, the teach-sphere’s project of transforming the masses reveals their many commonalities. The essay reflects on how the intersections of culture and power shaped early Soviet culture, the avant-garde, and successive phases of Stalinist culture. While Socialist Realism promoted the theoretical declaration of a unified socialist culture, the persistence of differing elements of the cultural system raises the question of Soviet cultural syncretism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document