In the Middle of It All: Prague, Brno, and the Avant-Garde Networks of Interwar Europe.

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to broaden our understanding of what has come to be widely called the “historical avant-garde” (Bürger) of the interwar period to incorporate lesser known—but equally important—sites of literary and artistic production in Europe from outside the western canon. In the Middle of It All: Prague, Brno, and the Avant-Garde Networks of Interwar Europe shows how a group of leftist Czech artists, writers, architects, and actors, led by Karel Teige, engaged dialogically with peers at home and around Europe in the 1920s. The networks that Devětsil built, and how it built them, can be observed today in the remaining letters, travel accounts, and publications of its members. These are the media around which this dissertation is organized, in its consideration of both the private and public avant-garde. By presenting the published manifestos and theoretical texts of the avant-garde in situ—considering the design of the periodicals in which they appeared, any images that might appear besides text, and what authors were included together in an issue—this dissertation adds both to previous close readings of the texts under consideration (Zusi), as well as seminal work that has stated convincingly the need to introduce the study of ephemeral, printed matter and its design into a history of the avant-gardes of the early Twentieth Century (Drucker). The theoretical frame within which networks are located and analyzed draws from the Social Sciences (Luhmann) as well as Post Colonial Studies (Buck-Morss, Mohanty, Pratt), Periodical Studies (Ardis, Brooker and Thacker, Philpotts, Scholes and Wulfman) and epistolary theory (Altman, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, MacArthur). Utilizing such an interdisciplinary model, this dissertation reveals that the outcomes of the interwar exchange described have had a wide reaching impact, not only on art production and intellectual output in then Czechoslovakia, but also with regard to that region’s influence around the European continent. Through a series of case studies that take the Czech avant-garde of the 1920s as its focus, this dissertation points out and challenges gaps in our popular, western-centric understanding of the European interwar avant-garde, and resists long held notions of center and periphery.