Search

Despite its brief history, Berlin Dada (1918–20) produced a glut of chronicles and memoirs, as if to immortalize its ephemeral insurgency. Its self-appointed chronicler, Richard Huelsenbeck, tried to harness this compulsion to memorialize in the service of Dadaist agitation he hoped would unleash a revolutionary time and redeem the failure of the communist uprisings at the end of World War I. his seditious temporality was based on two incompatible concepts of revolution: a properly political notion aimed at overthrowing an unjust regime and a vitalist discourse aimed at tapping into the circular low of life. he clash of the two modes of revolutionary time is enacted in Hannah Höch's photomontage “Cut with the Kitchen Knife” (1919). he spectral temporality that sustains both is conjured by the Dada Almanac (1920), a literary compendium that doubles as a quirky inquiry into political normativity and an inluential paradigm of Dada's self-legitimation.

This essay juxtaposes the understanding of Konstruktion developed within German Constructivism to the humanist notion of Bildung that framed debates on the Bildungsroman and the novel at the beginning of the twentieth century. Far from refuting the project of Bildung, Konstruktion actualizes some of its central tenets while grappling with the questions of temporality and futurity that bedeviled the idea of Bildung. After tracing the ways in which Bildung and Konstruktion played out discursively in the early twentieth century, I examine how the two tropes are productively unfolded in One-Way Street (1928), Walter Benjamin's endeavor at grounding and enacting an activist model of literature. At issue is the possibility of grasping literature as a realm for the performative construction of the human outside the historical teleology that rendered Bildung unacceptable.

When the Anglo-American artists known as "neo-dada" re- discovered the work of Kurt Schwitters in the late 1950s, they thought they had found a model for robust artistic intervention that promised a way out of the strictures of Abstract Expression- ism. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Allan Kaprow saw in Schwitters's collages of recycled refuse a model for critiquing the self-perpetuating cycle of consumerism and waste in capitalist societies. However, their interpretation of Schwitters's practices was based on a misreading of sorts, since Schwitters's use of trash in his collages had never been intended as an anti-capitalist critique of social relations in its day. Quite to the contrary. It had originally served to sustain a formalist aesthetics predicated on the autonomy of art from politics. Indeed, Schwitters's flaunted disinterest for politics with regard to Germany's aborted revolu- tion and the turmoil of the early Weimar period had earned him the contempt of militant Dadaists like George Grosz and Richard Huelsenbeck, who curtly denied his request for admission to the

This article examines the discourse on kitsch articulated by Austrian novelists Hermann Broch (1886-1951) and Robert Musil (1880-1942) between 1930 and 1950. In particular, I focus on the ways in which the two novelists draw the distinction of value between real and pseudo art (or kitsch). As I argue, their disagreement on this matter is emblematic of dilemmas that continue to confront aesthetic evaluation today. While Broch anchors value in a metaphysical realm on the outside of aesthetic discourse, assuming a late-idealistic notion of art, Musil frames the distinction between 'good' and 'bad' art within an empirical, relativistic, and immanent understanding of aesthetic experience. In the final section I draw on Hal Foster's notion of a "critical distance" (The Return of the Real, 1996) to discuss the advantages and limitations of the evaluative paradigms suggested by the two novelists.