A Glossary of Catchwords of the Czech Avant-Garde Conceptions of Aesthetics and the Changing Faces of Art 1908-1958

A Glossary of Catchwords of the Czech Avant-garde is a collective enterprise aimed at reconstructing some of the landmark concepts and ideas that the Czech avant-garde brought primarily into literature and the visual arts. In general, the reader will not find here entries on the traditional groupings, the various ‘isms’, periodicals or standard categories from the history of art and literature giving a typical description and history of them.

The entries seek insteadto give a ‘reconstructive’ account of the concepts concerned, mindful of the principle of crossover between media, but also of specific creative methods and practices. They have been conceived, therefore, as reconstructions of interactions (text, picture,music, theatre, film, photography) with the period context in scholarship and cultural philosophy and sociopolitical activity. The texts of the entries, of unequal length, expressly vary in genre between retrospective reconstructions of art-historical or socio-cultural phenomena and pieces focussed on areas that have been reckoned problematic and open to mixed interpretations. This heterogeneity seeks to enhance the transparency of the terms that the book does include diachronically and synchronically. Theentries focus in the main on literature and the visual arts, though theatre and film are not ignored. Architecture and modern music feature passim, rather than through topic-centred entries of their own. In contrast to earlier discussions of the receptionof the Czech avant-garde, we have pushed its origins back to the first decade of the twentieth century. And the evolution of the Czech avant-garde as a group movement, its programmes, aesthetic concepts and ever-mutating artistic strategies, techniques and practices are then traced right up to 1958.