Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Convinced that all aspects of modern culture have been affected by avant-garde art, Renato Poggioli explores the relationship between the avant-garde and civilization. Historical parallels and modern examples from all the arts are used to show how the avant-garde is both symptom and cause of many major extra-aesthetic trends of our time, and that the contemporary avant-garde is the sole and authentic one.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• The Concept of the Avant-Garde
• Prologue Terminological ups-and-downs
• The two avant-gardes
• A novel concept, a novel fact
• The Concept of a Movement
• Schools and movements
• The dialectic of movements Activism Antagonism
• Romanticism and the Avant-Garde
• Popularity and unpopularity Romanticism as a precedent
• Down-with-the-past Anticipations
• Agonism and Futurism
• Nihilism Agonism
• Futurism Decadence
• Fashion, Taste, and the Public
• Fashion, avant-garde, and stereotype Intelligentsia and elite
• The intellectual elite
• The avant-garde and politics
• The State of Alienation
• Art and society Psychological and social alienation
• Econoimic and cultural alienation Stylistic and aesthetic alienation
• Technology and the Avant-Garde
• Experimentalism Scientificism
• Humorism Nominalistic proof
• Avant-Garde Criticism
• Prerequisites The problem of obscurity
• Judgment and prejudgment Criticism, right and left
• Aesthetics and Poetics
• Dehumanization Cerebralism and voluntarism
• Metaphysics of the metaphor
• The mystique of purity
• History and Theory
• Historical parallels Modernity and modernism
• The overcoming of the avant-garde
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index