Dancing at the forefront - Ideas about the avant-garde

The cultural history and cultural phenomenology concept of the avant-garde is used in everyday speech in such a way that the boundaries of the concept are unclear and its focus is vague. The book’s multi-threaded, multi-layered approach ultimately seeks to clarify the concept: it formulates and attempts to answer historical and morphological questions that make it clearer what the specific otherness, foreignness, and peripherality of the avant-garde are, and how this otherness nevertheless exerts a decisive influence on the central processes of the European cultural tradition. The theoretical chapters focus on issues such as self-reference, repetition, representation and its avoidance, or artistic experimentalism itself. The background to these theoretical questions is built on the historical chapters, which primarily focus on the literary activism of Kassák and his circle, as well as the parallel international Dadaism. The universality of the phenomena examined is indicated by the fact that the spectrum of illuminating examples extends from the reception of the late Vörösmarty to the work of Tibor Hajas and Dezső Tandori.