UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Tendentious Modernism: Karel Teige's Path to Functionalism

Zusi, P; (2008) Tendentious Modernism: Karel Teige's Path to Functionalism. Slavic Review: Interdisciplinary Quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies , 67 (4) pp. 821-839. 10.2307/27653026. Green open access

[thumbnail of Zusi_Teige_Prol Um.pdf]
Preview
Text
Zusi_Teige_Prol Um.pdf

Download (357kB) | Preview

Abstract

The category of tendentiousness—with its dogmatic, didactic, and aesthetically conservative inclinations—seems inherently opposed to the logic of modernism, which emphasized the aesthetic moment of formal innovation. While many modernists argued for the compatibility between aesthetic and political revolution, they invariably met the skepticism of those demanding a clear, ůnambiguously expressed political message from art. But was this conceptual divide unbridgeable? In this article, Peter Zusi explores this question through the case of the Czech theorist of the interwar avant-garde, Karel Teige. Teige exemplifies how the early Czech avant-garde adopted such terms as function and popular character (lidovost) from nineteenth-century Czech discourse, where they had served to celebrate the tendentious applicability of cultural artifacts to a political movement of emancipation. For Teige, however, these terms quickly shifted from accentuating to critiquing political tendentiousness. Teige's shift, Zusi argues, does not represent the trace of cultural belatedness or conceptual confusion as much as it reveals the flexibility of conceptual oppositions too often conceived as static.

Type: Article
Title: Tendentious Modernism: Karel Teige's Path to Functionalism
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.2307/27653026
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.2307/27653026
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Czech literature, 1900-1999, Teige, Karel, prose, modernism, functionalism
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > SSEES
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1575063
Downloads since deposit
240Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item