Avantpop
Encyclopedia
Avantpop is an American artistic
movement which derived from postmodernism
in the 1990s
.
According to its proponents, among which there are literary critic Larry McCaffery
and writer Mark Amerika
, Avantpop is characterized by the use of materials coming from the mass media
(cinema
, pop music
, television
, comics
, internet
, videogames
), that are mostly assembled in literary texts
where avantgarde techniques and devices are also applied. The Avant-Pop Manifesto, which propounded this literary trend, was written by Mark Amerika, and can be read on the web.
The name of the movement has been taken by Larry McCaffery
from the homonymous 1986 album by American jazz
musician Lester Bowie
(Avant Pop - Brass Fantasy
), where pop tunes are scored for a brass ensemble
.
Among the most important representatives of the movement there are Kathy Acker
, Mark Amerika
, Jonathan Lethem
, Steve Erickson
, Matt Ruff
, Patricia Anthony
, Lewis Shiner
, Joe R. Lansdale
, Lance Olsen
, William T. Vollmann
, Mark Leyner
, Douglas Anthony Cooper
, and David Foster Wallace
.
There are also some forerunners of Avantpop literature, and they are genre writers like Harlan Ellison
, William Gibson
and Philip K. Dick
(above all his Valis
Trilogy), or postmodernist authors like Kurt Vonnegut
and Thomas Pynchon
(especially in his novels of the Nineties).
Some film directors are also considered part of the Avantpop movement or attuned to Avantpop sensibility: Quentin Tarantino
, Robert Rodriguez
, Joel and Ethan Coen, and Serbian director Emir Kusturica
.
An important book for the definition of the Avantpop canon is the anthology After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology (1996) edited by Larry McCaffery
.
Two literary areas are quite close to the Avantpop sensibility: slipstream
fiction and New Weird
.
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
movement which derived from postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
in the 1990s
1990s
File:1990s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: The Hubble Space Telescope floats in space after it was taken up in 1990; American F-16s and F-15s fly over burning oil fields and the USA Lexie in Operation Desert Storm, also known as the 1991 Gulf War; The signing of the Oslo Accords on...
.
According to its proponents, among which there are literary critic Larry McCaffery
Larry McCaffery
Lawrence F. "Larry" McCaffery Jr. is a literary critic, editor, and retired professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University...
and writer Mark Amerika
Mark Amerika
Mark Amerika is an American artist and author.- Career :Amerika received his MFA from Brown University. After publishing two cult-novels, and , he turned his energy towards net art. His goal is to expand the concept of writing so that it includes writing in and with new media technologies. He...
, Avantpop is characterized by the use of materials coming from the mass media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
(cinema
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
, pop music
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...
, television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
, comics
Comics
Comics denotes a hybrid medium having verbal side of its vocabulary tightly tied to its visual side in order to convey narrative or information only, the latter in case of non-fiction comics, seeking synergy by using both visual and verbal side in...
, internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, videogames
VideoGames
VideoGames may refer to:*VideoGames, a mid-1990s magazine about video games.*Video games in general....
), that are mostly assembled in literary texts
Written language
A written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children, who will instinctively learn or create spoken or gestural languages....
where avantgarde techniques and devices are also applied. The Avant-Pop Manifesto, which propounded this literary trend, was written by Mark Amerika, and can be read on the web.
The name of the movement has been taken by Larry McCaffery
Larry McCaffery
Lawrence F. "Larry" McCaffery Jr. is a literary critic, editor, and retired professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University...
from the homonymous 1986 album by American jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
musician Lester Bowie
Lester Bowie
Lester Bowie was an American jazz trumpet player and composer. He was a member of the AACM, and cofounded the Art Ensemble of Chicago.-Biography:...
(Avant Pop - Brass Fantasy
Avant Pop (album)
Avant Pop is the fourth album by Lester Bowie recorded for ECM and the second album by his "Brass Fantasy" group. It was released in 1986 and features performances by Bowie, Vincent Chancey, Frank Lacy, Rasul Siddik, Steve Turre, Malachi Thompson, Stanton Davis, Bob Stewart and Phillip...
), where pop tunes are scored for a brass ensemble
Musical ensemble
A musical ensemble is a group of people who perform instrumental or vocal music. In classical music, trios or quartets either blend the sounds of musical instrument families or group together instruments from the same instrument family, such as string ensembles or wind ensembles...
.
Among the most important representatives of the movement there are Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S...
, Mark Amerika
Mark Amerika
Mark Amerika is an American artist and author.- Career :Amerika received his MFA from Brown University. After publishing two cult-novels, and , he turned his energy towards net art. His goal is to expand the concept of writing so that it includes writing in and with new media technologies. He...
, Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels...
, Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson
Stephen Michael Erickson is an American novelist, essayist and film critic. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters's Award in Literature and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation., and is considered an important representative of the Avantpop...
, Matt Ruff
Matt Ruff
Matthew Theron Ruff is an American author of thriller, science-fiction and comic novels.-Background and education:...
, Patricia Anthony
Patricia Anthony
Patricia Anthony is an American science fiction and Slipstream author. Anthony published her first science fiction novel in 1992 with Cold Allies, about the arrival of extraterrestrials in the midst of a 21st Century Third World War...
, Lewis Shiner
Lewis Shiner
Lewis Shiner is an American writer.Shiner began his career as a science fiction writer, identified early on with cyberpunk, and later wrote more mainstream novels, albeit often with magical realism and fantasy elements...
, Joe R. Lansdale
Joe R. Lansdale
Joe R. Lansdale is an American author and martial-arts expert. He has written novels and stories in many genres, including Western, horror, science fiction, mystery, and suspense...
, Lance Olsen
Lance Olsen
- Biography :Lance Olsen received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison , an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop , and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia...
, William T. Vollmann
William T. Vollmann
William Tanner Vollmann is an American novelist, journalist, short story writer, essayist and winner of the National Book Award...
, Mark Leyner
Mark Leyner
Mark Leyner is an American postmodernist author.Leyner employs an intense and unconventional style in his works of fiction. His stories are generally humorous and absurd: In The Tetherballs of Bougainville, Mark's father survives a lethal injection at the hands of the New Jersey penal system, and...
, Douglas Anthony Cooper
Douglas Anthony Cooper
Douglas Anthony Cooper is a writer originally from Canada, who lived for many years in New York City and currently resides in Oaxaca, Mexico. He trained in philosophy and architecture, and these are the areas that dominate his novels, which are generally placed in the category of postmodern fiction...
, and David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California...
.
There are also some forerunners of Avantpop literature, and they are genre writers like Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison
Harlan Jay Ellison is an American writer. His principal genre is speculative fiction.His published works include over 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, essays, a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media...
, William Gibson
William Gibson
William Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.William Gibson may also refer to:-Association football:*Will Gibson , Scottish footballer...
and Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
Philip Kindred Dick was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments and altered...
(above all his Valis
Valis
Valis may refer to:*VALIS, a 1981 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick*Valis , a videogame series.**Valis: The Fantasm Soldier, first game in the series...
Trilogy), or postmodernist authors like Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle , Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.-Early...
and Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
(especially in his novels of the Nineties).
Some film directors are also considered part of the Avantpop movement or attuned to Avantpop sensibility: Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
, Robert Rodriguez
Robert Rodriguez
Robert Anthony Rodríguez is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor and musician. He shoots and produces many of his films in his native Texas and Mexico. He has directed such films as Desperado, From Dusk till Dawn, The Faculty, Spy Kids, Sin City, Planet...
, Joel and Ethan Coen, and Serbian director Emir Kusturica
Emir Kusturica
Emir Nemanja Kusturica , is a Serbian filmmaker, actor and musician, recognized for several internationally acclaimed feature films...
.
An important book for the definition of the Avantpop canon is the anthology After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology (1996) edited by Larry McCaffery
Larry McCaffery
Lawrence F. "Larry" McCaffery Jr. is a literary critic, editor, and retired professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University...
.
Two literary areas are quite close to the Avantpop sensibility: slipstream
Slipstream
A slipstream is a region behind a moving object in which a wake of fluid is moving at velocities comparable to the moving object . The term slipstream also applies to the similar region adjacent to an object with a fluid moving around it...
fiction and New Weird
New Weird
The New Weird is a literary genre that began in the 1990s and developed in a series of novels and stories published from 2001 to 2005. The writers involved are mostly novelists who are considered to be parts of the horror and/or speculative fiction genres but who often cross genre boundaries...
.