The “total work of art,” from the German Gesamtkunstwerk, is associated with Wagner’s desire for artworks to unify the various modes of artistic expression and form an integral part of the cultural...

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The Total Work of Art in European Modernism

Murphy, Richard. 1999. Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $57.95 hc. $19.95 sc. 325 pp. One of scholarly criticism's great pleasures is the reexamination of a favored subject history has forgotten or misunderstood. Richard Murphy performs such gratifying labor in Theorizing the Avant-Garde, a work devoted to the recuperation of German expressionism as an example of "the historical avant-garde." Murphy approaches expressionism through the lens of Peter Burger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, a 1970s text that used dada and surrealism to articulate criteria for politically conscious artistic endeavor. Burger's Theory, which is itself a self-conscious response to Renato Poggioli's work of the same title, takes Poggioli to task for his excessively optimistic account of the conjunctions between political and aesthetic avant-garde movements. Murphy revisits Burger to show both that German expressionism shares key characteristics with Burger's own definition of progressive artistic movements, and that Burger underestimated the radical potential of the aesthetic avant-garde. Murphy begins by recapitulating the revolutionary, counter-discursive, and anti-- institutional functions that, according to Burger, make the "historical avant-garde" unique. His accounts of ideology-critique, aesthetic autonomy, epistemological skepticism and anti-organicism are lucid and deft, as are his discussions of their attendant techniques: montage, satire, expressionist epic, the rhetoric of melodrama, and satire. Murphy's adjacent goals are to present undeniably striking affinities between the more "sophisticated" expressionists' strategies and postmodernism, and to respond to critics of the avant-garde and postmodernism who suggest aesthetic movements ultimately foreclose, rather than enable, real political change. To make his case for the continuing relevance of the German expressionist contributions, Murphy first refines Burger, whose argument he feels suffers from a "fundamental ambiguity with regard to the category of aesthetic autonomy"(27). While he agrees that many modernist texts, and even some "naive" expressionist texts, undermine their radical potential by substituting an illusion of closure in the place of genuinely radical aesthetic autonomy, he creates within Burger's theory a subheading of "de-aestheticized autonomous art"(33)-an art that resists affirmative pressures and therefore co-optation--and proposes that "art and life can be brought together" through a "'cynical' sublation of art and life": bringing art down to the banal level of reality, fragmenting artistic form, dismantling the syntax of poetic language and destroying any lingering sense of harmony and of organic structuring, so that the work of art leaves the realm of the ideal and harmonious forms, and descends to the disjointed world of modernity. (Murphy 1999, 34) It is precisely this "cynical" sublation which Murphy's book extols in the more 11 sophisticated" expressionist works. These expressionists are avant-garde, he argues, not only in their interrogations of convention, but also in their deconstruction of the ideology (and institution) of art. The "oppositional discourses" made possible by expressionist art ultimately undermine all false objectivism. Murphy's interdisciplinary account displays an impressive command of literary theory, drawing alternately upon Marxism, discourse theory, structuralism and psychoanalysis. His close readings of Kafka's The Metamorphosis and the Weimar-era silent film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, are particularly persuasive, and his examinations of the poetics of Dublin and Benn render those works convincingly proto-- postmodern. …

Roger Fornoff

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