Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern - Softcover

Lyon, Janet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801485916 ISBN 13: 9780801485916

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1999

Synopsis

For more than three hundred years, manifestoes have defined the aims of radical groups, individuals, and parties while galvanizing revolutionary movements. As Janet Lyon shows, the manifesto is both a signal genre of political modernity and one of the defining forms of aesthetic modernism. Ranging from the pamphlet wars of seventeenth-century England to dyke and ACT-UP manifestoes of the 1990s, her extraordinarily accomplished book offers the first extended treatment of this influential form of discourse. Lyon demonstrates that the manifesto, usually perceived as the very model of rhetorical transparency, is in fact a complex, ideologically inflected genre―one that has helped to shape modern consciousness. Lyon explores the development of the genre during periods of profound historical crisis. The French Revolution generated broadsides that became templates for the texts of Chartism, the Commune, and late-nineteenth-century anarchism, while in the twentieth century the historical avant-garde embraced a revolutionary discourse that sought in the manifesto's polarizing polemics a means for disaggregating and publicizing radical artistic movements. More recently, in the manifestoes of the 1960s, the wretched of the earth called for either the full realization or the final rejection of the idea of the universal subject, paving the way for contemporary contestations of identity among second- and third-wave feminists and queer activists.

About this title

Review:

"This book is suggestive in its argument and expansive in its topics... Recommended for all readers who are interested in the history of political modernism."

Source: Virginia Quarterly Review

"This book provides compelling histories and analysis for scholars of media and social movements to mine for inspiration."

Source: Journal of Communication

"Brilliantly nuanced and historically rich... Janet Lyon's acute weaving of modernist history, manifestic dissent, avant-garde aesthetics, and feminist struggle is gracefully learned, supple, and exciting. We are left with an entirely fresh sense of the extent to which the public spheres of modernity permitted their linguistic and political freedoms."

Source: Yearbook of English Studies

"Lyon offers an innovative, far-ranging study... A complex, lucid, and nuanced study of the manifesto as the signature genre of aesthetic and political militancy, this volume will be indispensible to all college and university collections."

Source: Choice

"A major, ground-breaking work of scholarship regarding the centrality of the manifesto to the political and aesthetic contradictions of modernity. From its opening pages, the book reveals itself as a lucid, confident and carefully argued piece of work, written with real elegance and elan. Lyon succeeds admirably in showing the connections between issues that have often been treated in isolation, such as revolutionary rhetoric, aesthetic theory, feminism, and the public sphere."

Author: Rita Felski, University of Virginia

"Janet Lyon's genre study of manifestoes and modernity has an impressively ambitious reach―from the Diggers and Levellers to the feminist SCUM and cyborgianism. She posits telling conjunctures between aesthetics and politics, avant-gardism and feminism, in such historical moments as Republican France, literary modernism, and second-wave feminism. The result is a fresh, new reading of manifestoes as a revolutionary form of discourse interwoven with the history of feminism and inseparable from the formation of the modern subject in the West."

Author: Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin–Madison

"This is a wonderful book. Anyone interested in revolutions―aesthetic, political, sexual―and the way they are represented by their most ardent proponents will want to read Janet Lyon's Manifestoes."

Author: Stephen Watt, Indiana University

Synopsis:

Since the 17th century, manifestoes have defined the aims of radical groups, individuals and parties while galvanizing revolutionary movements. The author of this volume shows that the manifesto is both a signal genre of political modernity and one of the defining forms of aesthetic modernism. Ranging from the pamphlet wars of 17th-century England to dyke and ACT-UP manifestoes of the 1990s, her text offers an extended treatment of this influential form of discourse. Lyon demonstrates that the manifesto, usually perceived as the very model of rhetoric transparency, is in fact a complex, ideologically inflected genre - one that has helped to shape modern consciousness. Lyon explores the development of the genre during periods of profound historical crisis. The French Revolution generated broadsides that became templates for the texts of Chartism, the Commune and late-19th-century anarchism, while in the 20th century, the historical avant-garde embraced a revolutionary discourse that sought in the manifesto's polarizing polemics a means for disaggregating and publicizing radical artistic movements.

More recently, she argues, in the manifestoes of the 1960s, the wretched of the earth called for either the full realization of the final rejection of the idea of the universal subject, paving the way for contemporary contestations of identity among second- and third-wave feminists and queer activists.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0801485916
• ISBN 13: 9780801485916
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240