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The Aesthetics of Disturbance: Anti-Art in Avant-Garde Drama. By David Graver. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Series. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995; pp. xi + 253. $39.50 cloth.
The ease with which David Graver crosses and expands disciplinary boundaries indicates both the depth of his sensibility and the sophistication of his scholarship. His inquiry seeks to uncover "anti-art" components, compositional strategies associated with visual and performance arts, in the early twentieth century avant-garde drama. In his study of the (anti)artistic, Graver does not simply apply the analytical tactics developed in the visual arts discipline as analogies; instead, he treats selected avant-garde dramas as two-dimensional anti-art objects. While he scarcely ignores the linguistic necessities required by a literary medium, Graver nevertheless approaches the anti-art dramatic texts as conflated visual and semiotic sites, valued more for their plastic affectability than for their discursivity, more for their dense, ambiguous, and sensuous presence than for their mimetic abilities.
Graver lays open how, for the anti-art avant-garde, montage allows the visual logic of juxtaposition to coexist with, and therefore reinforce, the discursive logic of thematic argument. He proclaims at the outset that his goal is "to understand the opacities and contentions of the avant-garde" through both a detailed reading of the cryptic dramas produced by Oskar Kokoschka, Gottfried Benn, Raymond Roussel, Roger Vitrac, and Wyndham Lewis, and "a broader survey of the aesthetic contexts" in which they work (2). What he examines as the "aesthetic contexts" emerge as the turbulent, wildly textured, yet somehow consistent ground upon which the disparate figures-Kokoschka, Benn, Roussel, Vitrac, Lewis-are raggedly assembled, their heterogeneous domains overlaying one another. Despite the explosive energy released from such a clashing union, Graver succeeds in pursuing his thematic avatar-the aesthetic formations of the "avant-garde" as a transforming concept and attitude-through its every descent into the mundi solitaire of the five playwrights. As the author perceives and carefully analyzes...