Strong Bret. The Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of Borges, Auden, and Breton

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997. — 384 p. — ISBN-10 0810115093; ISBN-13 978-0810115095.A literary and cultural study of three diverse manifestations in artistic exploration in the 1920s and 1930s - the groups surrounding Jorge Luis Borges, W.H. Auden, and Andre Breton. These groups were composed of poets and writers who made use of the avant-garde's characteristic modes of self-expression: the publication of small journals; unorthodox attention-getting tactics; and interaction with the mainstream press. However, their differing aesthetic, social and political agendas illustrate the broad range of avant-gardism in the interwar era. The book examines the choices these three groups made when their radical goals collided with the forces of social and political change in the 1920s and 1930s, highlighting the disparity between their rhetoric and their actual achievements. It focuses on the avant-garde's struggle to reconcile contradictory imperatives: a desire to be radically new while at the same time finding an audience that would allow it to survive.Elite “Fellowships of Discourse”: The Argentine Vanguardia, the Auden Group, and the French SurrealistsThe Argentine VanguardiaThe Radical Conservatism of the Journals and Manifestos of the Argentine Vanguardia
Borges and Girondo: Who Led the Vanguardia?
Borges and SurThe Auden GroupThe Mutable Myth of Auden’s 1930s
The Struggle Over Value and Belief
MacNeice, Empson, and Auden: A Politics of ReceptionThe French SurrealistsThe Surrealists’ Search for Authenticity and Independence
Surrealism’s Divided Critics
“Lights becoming darks, boys, waiting for the end”: Comparing the Fates of the Groups of Borges, Auden, and BretonNotes
Selected Bibliography
Index