The Literary Manifesto and Related Notions:

A Selected Annotated Bibliography

Galia Yanoshevsky
French, Bar-Ilan University

The bibliography starts with the four earliest, pioneering collections. The
next section proceeds with works in alphabetical order, and finally the last
section lists dissertations on the topic alphabetically.

Collections

1980 Etudes françaises, special issue, “Le manifeste poétique/politique,” 16

(3–4).
The special issue is devoted to various aspects—institutional as well as
poetic—of the manifesto. An example of the institutional aspects is in Diane
Poliquin-Bourassa and Daniel Latouche’s article on political manifestos in
Quebec (“Les manifestes politiques québécois: Médium ou message?” 31–
42). The authors claim that these Quebec manifestos were used by French
Canadians to assert their existence in generally English-speaking Canada
(32). They show how the tone and language of the manifestos evolve in
relation to the political changes in Canada and how they reflect the themes
that arise in the country’s politics (for instance, the theme of liberation in
the 1960s). The poetic aspects of the manifesto are variously studied in a
number of essays, particularly with regard to such manifestos as those of
futurism or Oulipo: the style or rhetoric of each movement is analyzed in
terms of the manifesto’s form and discourse.

I would like to thank Jürgen Siess for his help with the texts in German.
Poetics Today 30:2 (Summer 2009)  DOI10.1215/03335372-2008-011
© 2009 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
288 Poetics Today 30:2

The collection opens with Daniel Chouinard’s attempt to trace the ori-
gins of the literary manifesto to political manifestos and to the first liter-
ary manifesto recognized by literary criticism, that is, Joachim Du Bellay’s
1549 La défense et illustration de la langue française (“Sur la préhistoire du mani-
feste littéraire [1900–1828],” 21–30). The issue contains a list of references
described by the editors as random. It lists both manifestos, or “manifes-
tary” writings, and selected critical works on polemical writings, including
manifestos, yet extends to work done on pamphlets, work on the poetics of
crisis, and work on the avant-garde generally.

1980 Littérature, special issue, “Les manifestes,” 39 (October).

This special issue attempts to define the characteristics of the manifesto
from different viewpoints: the manifesto as a call to action ( Jean-Marie
Gleize, 12–16), the manifesto as a speech act ( Jacques Filliolet, 23–28), typi-
cal functional characteristics of the manifesto (Shelley Yahalom, 111–19), the
political manifesto (Alain Meyer, 29–38). The issue also includes specific
case studies of literary and artistic manifestos of the historical avant-garde
(Claude Abastado on Dadaism, 39–46; Nicole Boulestreau on surrealism,
47–53) and an analysis of manifestos in different artistic fields, such as music,
painting, and cinema. The opening article by Abastado (3–11) examines the
possibility of approaching manifesto as a distinct genre. He characterizes it
through its style (tone, language, grammar) and its intentions (to persuade)
and suggests tools for its study (for example, structural analysis).

Hardee, Maynor, ed.

1980 Manifestoes and Movements, French Literature Series, vol. 7 (South
Carolina: University of South Carolina, College of Humanities and
Social Sciences, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures).
This volume assembles articles from the annual French Literature Con-
ference on Manifestoes and Movements. These cover a wide span, from
the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and explore a variety of texts.
Examples are manifestos related to the French lyric in the early modern
period (David Lee Rubin, “Unity, Sequence, and the Arts of Compensa-
tion: A Perspective on Formal Trends in the French Lyric from 1550 to
1630—and Beyond,” 16–27); manifestos of the eighteenth-century novel,
among them Denis Diderot’s Eloge de Richardson (1761) (Lawrence W.
Lynch, “Three Manifestoes of the Eighteenth-Century Novel: An Exercise
in Camouflage,” 28–37); and the post–World War II manifestos of the Hus-
sard movement in French literature (Thomas M. Hines, “Rebels without
a Cause,” 110–14).
Readers interested in the specificity of the historical avant-garde mani-
 Yanoshevsky • Literary Manifesto and Related Notions 289

festo may well consult Lauren Shumway’s article (“The Intelligibility of

the Avant-Garde Manifesto,” 54–62). The thrust of this article lies in the
way Shumway differentiates avant-garde manifestos from what is gener-
ally considered the first literary manifesto, namely, Joachim Du Bellay’s La
défense et illustration de la langue française (1549). While the sixteenth-century
French poet seeks to appeal to as wide a group as possible, his text addresses
all cultivated speakers of French; the avant-garde manifesto, by contrast,
seeks to limit as much as possible the pledged group to the ones defined as
“artists,” in opposition to society. The latter manifesto is thus viewed as
a pledge (“un serment,” a term borrowed from Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1960
Critique de la raison dialectique), that is, a way to form a cohesive group with
an eye to future praxis in, and against, a hostile world, and as a strategy
to determine one’s own actions, so that the addressees do likewise (57), in
the name of a common interest. This pledge involves what Shumway calls
the “stylistic terrorism” of the manifesto. By this phrase, she refers to the
topos that affirms the absolute necessity of a given form of cultural pro-
duction as the only possible form for culture to take in the present period
and correspondingly negates all other forms of cultural production in the
same period. This stylistic terrorism has two ends. One is the welding of
an avant-garde group; the other investing the group’s works and texts with
both aesthetic and economic value.
The volume also contains a bibliography on movements and their
manifestos by William T. Starr (115–32). The bibliography is prefaced by
an explanation of how the texts were selected and classified by centuries
(mostly the eighteenth to twentieth centuries) and movements or schools
(realism, naturalism, Nouveau Roman, etc.).

1983 L’esprit créateur 23 (4).

This (untitled) special issue is devoted to polemical writings and largely
responds to the two special issues on manifestos in French (Etudes fran-
çaises 1980 and Littérature 1980, both surveyed above). Three articles are of
particular interest in regard to the concept of manifesto. Jeanne Demers’s
“Le manifeste, crise—ou caution?—du système” (3–10) studies the close
relationship between a text and the institution it represents, claiming that
each change in the text reflects a social change. Jean-Jacques Thomas, in
“Contre-écriture (1830–1852)” (11–21), also views the manifesto as reflect-
ing society and considers that “writing against” (“la contre-écriture”) is a
genre of its own. Alice Yeager Kaplan’s “Recent Theoretical Work with
Pamphlets and Manifestoes” (74–82) has a particular metacritical interest.
It reviews some major works on pamphlets and manifestos (Etudes littéraires,
special issue, “Le pamphlet,” 11 [2] [1978]; Etudes françaises [1980] and Litté-
290 Poetics Today 30:2

rature [1980], surveyed above; Marc Angenot, La parole pamphlétaire [1982]),

surveyed below. Kaplan studies the mutual contamination of the manifesto
and its critical discourse.

Works on Manifesto

Angenot, Marc
1978 “La parole pamphlétaire,” Etudes littéraires 11 (2): 255–64.
1982 La parole pamphlétaire (Paris: Payot).
In his 1978 article, Angenot studies the discursive aspects of the pamphlet
by reference to a corpus of polemical, pamphletary texts and of satires pub-
lished in France and in French-speaking countries in the modern period.
Though he does not specifically study the manifesto there, he includes it
in the family of “polemical discourses” (“discours polémiques”), among
other subdivisions, such as polemic, satire, and literary essay. However, in
his 1982 book on pamphletary discourse, he devotes a separate subchapter
to the manifesto as a variant of polemical discourse, since it asserts and
defends a thesis and invites the reader to take a stance (60–61).

Asholt, Wolfgang, and Walter Fähnders, eds.

1995 Manifeste und Proklamationenen der europäischen Avantgarde (1909–1938)
(Stuttgart, Germany: Metzler).
The anthology contains a wide array of documents belonging to interna-
tional movements that sprang from the historical European avant-garde,
starting with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s foundational Futurist Manifesto
(1909) and running to the eve of World War II with André Breton and Leo
Trotzky’s 1938 Mexican Manifesto. The book assembles almost 250 mani-
festos, published in Russian, French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese,
and includes Latin American movements, which arose from the European
literary and artistic scene. The editors present the major branches of the
historical avant-garde—futurism, Dadaism, Constructivism, and surreal-
ism—but their introduction also deals with movements outside and beyond
the “mainstream” avant-garde: from Aism to Zenitism, from Instantanism
to Tabuism. In historical, chronological order, the introduction surveys the
futurist years from 1909 to 1916, the phase between Dada and revolution
from 1916 to 1920, 1920–24 as the years when “isms” flourished, and the
later development of surrealism from 1924 to 1938. Thus it describes the
extent and types of relationships established among and within individual
movements and explains specific national developments and varieties. The
document also contains glossaries, indexes, and a bibliography of interna-
tional scholarly work. These add to its value as a research tool for the study
of the international offshoots of the historical European avant-garde.
 Yanoshevsky • Literary Manifesto and Related Notions 291

1997 “Die ganze Welt ist eine Manifestation”: Die europaïsche Avantgarde und ihre
Manifeste (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft).
This collection assembles articles by specialists in German and Slavic lit-
erature, Romance studies, and art history who approach the manifesto
as a genre that played a large role in the development of the historical
avant-garde. According to the editors, the research on this genre has so
far been inadequate (14), as is evident from their 1995 anthology (reviewed
above), which gathers 250 manifestos from two dozen national literatures,
arranged in chronological order. Thus the present collection aims to fill in
a gap in our knowledge of the manifesto’s history and the history of ideas
by attacking them from various angles.
The four opening chapters, by Walter Fähnders (18–38), Birgit Wagner
(39–57), Hubert van den Berg (58–80), and Gisela Febel (81–108), are com-
parative and deal with various aspects of the genre’s theory and history.
Here political and generic positions and implications of the historical avant-
garde concerning the manifesto are reviewed and explained by appeal to
the differences and the similarities among different avant-garde manifes-
tations and manifestos. From a comparative point of view, the manifesto is
undoubtedly the principal genre of the historical avant-garde movements.
It is used there in characteristic ways, which test its possibilities, play with
them, and finally culminate in the self-cancellation (Selbstaufhebung) of the
manifestos and their writers.
These four opening chapters are followed by articles on the manifesto
in national literary contexts and on particular avant-garde movements,
which confirm the findings and arguments of the previous chapters. This
holds for the Romanian manifestos and Italian futurism, both discussed
by Manfred Hinz (132–60); for French Dada, as studied by Claude Leroy
(275–95); for French surrealism, analyzed by Karlheinz Barck (296–309),
and for the Spanish avant-garde, discussed by Wolfgang Asholt (161–83).
All of these trace an evolution of the avant-garde movements from Italian
futurism to the dominance of surrealism in France but also to later devel-
opments in the Spanish context.
The German and German-speaking avant-garde develops within
Expressionism, though the assignment of the latter to the historical avant-
garde remains controversial. However, Michael Stark (238–55) claims that
Expressionism should not be eliminated from the debate on the avant-
garde, despite the rather restricted role it played at the time. In response,
Alfons Backes-Hasse (256–74) foregrounds the more international Dada
developed in Zurich. Its more advanced manifestos explore all the possi-
bilities of avant-garde work and of the genre itself within it, introducing a
new dimension that Backes-Hasse calls “meta-semiotic speeches.”
The Slavic avant-garde evolves in parallel to the Italian before World
292 Poetics Today 30:2

War I, but it develops independent manifestos, which, after the October

Revolution, surpass their West European counterparts, as argued in Léon
Robel’s (184–203) article on Russian manifestos. Czech and Serbo-Croatian
cultures also show numerous and varied manifestations of the avant-garde
in a smaller, albeit important, linguistic arena. Thus the close ties forged
between images and words in the Czech Poetism movement (as explained
by Pavel Liška, 204–21) or in the various isms, such as the Serbo-Croatian
Zenitism, a movement that conducted a dialogue with the West European
varieties of the avant-garde (Holger Siegel, 222–37).

Beekman, Klaus, ed.

Avant Garde Critical Studies (Amsterdam: Rodopi).
This series of twenty-three volumes is dedicated to the study of various
aspects of the historical avant-garde movements as well as to contempo-
rary European developments, such as manifestos (vol. 11), the avant-garde
and politics (vols. 19 and 22), film (vol. 23), comics (vol. 16), the visual (vol.
10), and criticism (vol. 21). So far twenty-three volumes have been pub-
lished. Of most interest to us is volume 11, Manifeste: Intentionalität (1998),
edited by Hubert van den Berg and Ralf Grüttemeier, reviewed in this sur-
vey under the editors’ names. In other volumes, some articles on various
aspects of the manifesto are also of interest: Martin Puchner’s “Screech-
ing Voices: Avant-Garde Manifestos in the Cabaret” (in vol. 15, European
Avant-Garde: New Perspectives, edited by Dietrich Scheunemann [2000]) is
reviewed below under Puchner; and Laura Winkiel’s “The Rhetoric of
Violence: Avant-Garde Manifestoes and the Myth of Racial Community”
(in vol. 19, The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde [1906–1940],
edited by Sascha Bru and Gunther Martens [2006]) is reviewed below
under Winkiel.

Berg, Hubert van den, and Ralf Grüttemeier, eds.

1998 Manifeste: Intentionalität (Amsterdam: Rodopi).
The collection is based on the editors’ assumption that programmatic writ-
ings, such as manifestos, should be examined in the light of a theory of
intentionality (introduction). The relationship among the artist, the work
of art, and the public is considered through the aspects of interpretation,
functionality, and strategy: in Berg and Grüttemeier’s view, these consti-
tute the manifesto. “Interpretation” refers to how the three types of inten-

.  A specifically Czech literary style, Poetism was developed between the two world wars by
the group Devětsil (Vítězslav Nezval, Jaroslav Seifert, Konstantin Biebl, and Karel Teige),
which argued that poetry should pervade everyday life, that poetry is inseparable from daily
life, and that everyone is a poet.
 Yanoshevsky • Literary Manifesto and Related Notions 293

tion—the author’s, the work’s, and the reader’s—are emphasized. “Func-

tionality” has to do with the orientation underlying the text: in literary or
artistic manifestos, this would be the claim—sincere or otherwise—to cre-
ate a distinct meaning (Eindeutigkeit). “Strategy” refers to the use of mani-
festos in the struggle waged in the cultural field.
This theory of intentionality is brought to bear on a series of manifestos,
from the declaration of Russian literary modernism (1893) to postmod-
ern manifestos, with a special emphasis on those of the historical avant-
garde. Walter Fähnders and Helga Karrenbrock’s article on the German
avant-garde painter Kurt Schwitters (“‘Ich sage nämlich das Gegenteil,
aber nicht immer?’ Die Avantgarde-Manifeste von Kurt Schwitters,” 57–
90) exemplifies the aspect of functionality. The authors find Schwitters’s
programmatic or polemical texts to be characterized by a peculiar inner
tension that he does not try to resolve. Thus Schwitters uses the manifesto
genre but undermines the message transmitted by using a style typified
by ruptures—for example, interjections like “Halt!” (“Stop!”) (87). Or he
borrows fragments from all sorts of texts that are not supposed to suit the
meaning of a manifesto, as suggested by the quotation in the article’s title
(“I namely say the opposite, but not always?”). However, meaning is not
totally abandoned but, even according to the manifesto, rather created in
the communication process established between the new artist (the Merzer)
and his or her ideal open-minded, highly specialized public (83). Thus
intentionality, one may infer, is not considered to be something given as
such but an implicit orientation to be figured out.

Blodgett, E. D., and A. G. Purdy, eds.

1990 Préfaces et manifestes littéraires/Prefaces and Literary Manifestoes (Edmon-
ton, Alberta, Canada: Research Institute for Comparative Literature).
This bilingual collection of articles is the proceedings of the conference
“Towards a History of the Literary Institution in Canada 3,” the third in
a series and so part of the larger project described in that title. It takes a
functional approach to the preface and the manifesto as texts designed
to situate another text or writing practice within the literary institution.
The collection is thus devoted to the study of prefaces and literary essays
as manifestos. The articles include Mary Lu MacDonald’s (29–42) analy-
sis of Canadian literary prefaces and prospectuses in the first half of the
nineteenth century. Examining them as a genre, she claims that they have
an overall social significance, which extends beyond the literary world to
national and moral imperatives. Likewise, Frank Davey’s (127–45) study
of the preface in English-Canadian literary criticism reveals the way a dis-
tinct Canadian identity is constructed in the syntax of the preface.
294 Poetics Today 30:2

Burger, Marcel
2002 Les manifestes: Paroles de combat; De Marx à Breton (Lonay, Switzerland:
Delachaux and Niestlé).
This book is an extension of Burger’s 1996 dissertation, “L’enjeu identitaire:
Pour une pragmatique psychosociale; Une analyse du manifeste du sur-
réalisme d’André Breton,” reviewed below (in the section on dissertations).
Though Burger still draws mainly upon André Breton’s “First Manifesto of
Surrealism” (1924) as a prototype of the genre, he broadens his perspective
by studying the place and role of political, literary, and avant-garde mani-
festos in propaganda-related activities and by resituating these manifestos
in the social reality that determines their meaning and importance. But
this book also studies manifestos from a synchronic point of view, in their
pragmatic and communicational aspects, in order to define their general
properties through their discourse: their vocabulary, how they refer to the
world, how they relate to crisis, how they call to action, how they handle
the question of identity. Burger sets the avant-garde manifesto apart from
both the political and the literary varieties, which to him share the same
public origins and objectives. The main difference, Burger argues, resides
in their intentionality: the former’s special characteristic is its subversive-
ness, while the other two constitute part of an existing public sphere that
they support (13).

Caws, Mary Ann, ed.

2001 Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).
An anthology featuring over two hundred artistic and cultural manifestos
of modernism from a wide range of countries, this book views the mani-
festo as a public statement that sets forth the tenets of an emergent, exist-
ing, or potential movement or “ism.” In various movements of modernism,
the manifesto serves as a crucial and powerful vehicle for artists, writers,
and other intellectuals, enabling them to express their ideas about the
direction of aesthetics and society.

Demers, Jeanne, and Line Mc Murray

1986 L’enjeu du manifeste, le manifeste en jeu (Quebec: Le Préambule).
The purpose of this book is to analyze the manifesto in pragmatic terms,
that is, as a speech act (texte-geste) within a context of utterance and recep-
tion. Instead of looking into the diverse political purposes of specific
manifestos, the authors attempt to establish a model of the manifesto as
a speech act, to demonstrate its diversity and its ambivalent relationship
with the institution, and to establish an open typology, including subcate-
gories, such as orders versus opposition, central versus peripheral, “every-
 Yanoshevsky • Literary Manifesto and Related Notions 295

dayism,” and so forth. It is an attempt, in short, to examine the manifesto

as a genre.

Dumasy, Lise, and Chantal Massol, eds.

2001 Pamphlet, utopie, manifeste XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: L’Harmattan).
Proceedings of a conference at Grenoble that bore the same title (Novem-
ber 1997), this collection brings together studies of political and literary
utopian discourses, pamphlets, and manifestos. The three genres are con-
sidered to be related, since they are all speech acts in the public sphere,
all believe in the efficacy of discourse, and all radically challenge the exist-
ing system. Appearing in all sorts of form—such as poetry, drama, novel,
and essay (even touching upon the autobiographical, as is demonstrated in
Brigitte Galtier’s [153–66] analysis of the poet Charles Péguy’s pamphlet
L’argent)—they nevertheless count as a genre per se. According to the edi-
tors of the collection, these discursive practices provide a mixture of argu-
mentation and fiction that remains to be investigated. In particular, the
collection aims to explore the logic that runs through the different modes
of argumentative discourse. Pamphlet, utopia, and manifesto are, accord-
ing to Dumasy and Massol, figures of modernity because they are inhab-
ited by revolutionary dreams, they are critical, and they are creative.

Halim, Hala, introducer and trans.

1991 “Literary Manifestos since the Seventies: Introduction and Transla-
tion,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 11: 98–112.
The article provides translations and introductions to editorials of issues
of the Egyptian literary journal Illumination ’77 spanning the ten years of
its publication (from 1977 to 1987). Signed by a group and programmatic
in nature, these texts are classified as manifestos by Halim. The Western
reader unfamiliar with Arabic thereby gains an opportunity to become
familiar with literary controversies in the Egyptian literary field through
the attacks launched by the editorials, here available, of literary periodi-
cals, such as Gallery ’68 (1968–79), and literary groups, such as Sanabil
(1969–72).

Harshav, Benjamin, ed.

2001 Manifestim shel modernizm ( Jerusalem: Carmel Editions; Tel Aviv:
Porter Institute of Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University).
A second, enlarged edition of a collection in Hebrew of postsymbolist
manifestos (‫ )מניפסטים של מודרניזם‬from Russian, German, Yiddish, French,
and Italian literature. Thus Vladimir Myakovsky’s “The Two Tchechovs”
(1914), which belongs to Russian futurism; Uri Zvi Greenberg’s “Before the
296 Poetics Today 30:2

INRI Cross” (1923), which is part of Yiddish Expressionism; and Stephan

Zweig’s “New Pathos” (1913), associated with German Expressionism, are
included. A previous edition of this collection appeared in 1964 under
the name Inheritors of Symbolism in European and Jewish Poetry: A Selection of
Manifestoes, Articles, and Declarations. This volume proposes to represent the
movements and ideas that were present in the consciousness of modern
Hebrew literature in the 1920s and 1930s, following the decline of sym-
bolism. These are the frames of reference for Hebrew poetry after World
War I.

Heimpel, Rod S.
1999 “Genre et généalogie: Le cas du manifeste littéraire au XIXe siècle,”
in Règles du genre et inventions du génie au XIX siècle, edited by Alain Gold-
schläger, Yzabelle Martineau, and Clive Thomson, 249–61 (Ontario:
Mestengo).
This article is a short version of Heimpel’s 1996 dissertation (surveyed
below among the dissertations) and appears in a section on “parallel liter-
ary genres” within a collection devoted to the concept of genre. Instead of
the synchronic, atemporal approach to genre used in formalist and struc-
turalist research, Heimpel proposes to trace the origins and genealogy of
the literary manifesto. He traces it back to Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve’s
Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française et du théâtre français au XVIe
siècle (1843 [1828]). There Joachim Du Bellay’s La défense et illustration de la
langue française (1549) is regarded as the manifesto of a new generation, the
Pléiade poets, trying to break away from the classical forms and themes of
writing. Yet most researchers of the literary manifesto consider it as origi-
nating in manifestary articles published in La figaro in the second half of the
nineteenth century (254–55). The use of manifesto in the literal sense of the
term begins, according to Heimpel, in the nineteenth century. A manifesto
becomes one not only when produced as such by a writer or artist but also
when identified in retrospect, as an “afterthought” of critics.

2002 Généalogie du manifeste littéraire (New Orleans: Presses Universitaires du

Nouveau Monde).
The book is based on the author’s dissertation (1996, see below). A history
of the literary manifesto must start, according to this book, with a careful
consideration of the political manifesto. As an instrument of rulers, or of
those who seek power, manifestos first served kings and aristocrats as early
as the sixteenth century; then after the French Revolution they became
important means of expression for revolutionary ideas within social-
ist movements. In order to avoid formal classifications, Heimpel studies
 Yanoshevsky • Literary Manifesto and Related Notions 297

the genealogy of the literary manifesto by asking what significations the

manifesto bears from the time of its writing to other epochs and other
audiences.

Hjartarson, Benedikt
2007 “Myths of Rupture: The Manifesto and the Concept of Avant-Garde,”
in Modernism, edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, 173–93
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins).
To explain the importance of the manifesto genre for the historical avant-
garde movements, this article offers a review of the manifesto’s evolution
into a politicized aesthetic form and a detailed case study of F. T. Mari-
netti’s writings before and after the 1909 Futurist Manifesto. The manifesto
is regarded as the medium through which, following the second phase of
the French Revolution, different political groups, artistic movements, lit-
erary “schools,” and individual authors have proclaimed and defined their
ideas of modernity.
The article begins a synthesis of previous work by scholars like Marjorie
Perloff, Matei Calinescu, Janet Lyon, Friedrich Wilhelm Malsch, Hubert
van den Berg, and others on the evolution of the manifesto from its politi-
cal to its literary varieties. The opening part clearly explains the aestheti-
cizing of the political and the drift of revolutionary themes to the sphere
of art at the end of the nineteenth century. The second part examines Ital-
ian futurism through Marinetti’s writings. It is an attempt to understand
the role that the manifesto plays in modernism’s avant-garde by analyzing
the theories and ideologies that influenced the writers of the manifestos,
notably in their use of imagery.
For Hjartarson, manifestos do not simply mirror the paradoxes of moder-
nity but have, over two centuries, inscribed the conflicts of modernization
in their structure and rhetorical codes. There writers reproduce, reflect,
reappropriate, and negate myths, theories, and ideas from the social or
cultural context, and these aspects become constitutive of the genre itself:
“The textual corpus of the modern manifesto thus constitutes an archive of
the foundation myths of modernity from the French Revolution up to the
present day” (173).
Hjartarson’s discussion centers on the “subversive manifesto” following
the French Revolution. This kind adopts authoritarian discourse but uses
it to express the will of the people as opposed to the bourgeoisie (174). The
subversive manifesto is closely related to the emerging concept of a revo-
lutionary avant-garde. Its rhetoric is highly metaphorical, akin to poems
in prose (175), and in general manifests the aestheticizing of political dis-
course through the revolutionary power of language. The subversive mani-
298 Poetics Today 30:2

festo not only supports political praxis, it is conceived as a revolutionary

rhetorical act (ibid.).
The historical avant-garde likewise initiates an extensive and targeted
production of aesthetic manifestos, now mostly labeled as such and co-
occurring with numerous poetic reflections on the genre. By this label,
Hjartarson claims, the avant-garde movements distance themselves from
the aesthetic “manifestos” of the fin de siècle and emphasize the politi-
cal genealogy of the genre: aesthetics meets politics there (178). No longer
simple aesthetic means, as at the end of the nineteenth century, mani-
festos at the beginning of the twentieth century are complex rhetorical
performances, aiming to transform the modern subject and to redefine the
political.
This is why the poetic character of the avant-garde manifesto is consti-
tutive of the genre and gives rise to a new conception of aesthetic activism.
By transforming the historical event traditionally declared in the political
manifesto into a poetic event, the avant-garde defines language itself as the
driving force of history. Thus revolutionary action both declared and exe-
cuted in the manifestos grows inseparable from the linguistic performance
of the manifesto itself.
The second part focuses on the rhetoric of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto
as a founding text that exhibited the rhetorical and aesthetic characteris-
tics of the genre (179). For example, violence now adheres to the provoca-
tive rhetoric of the avant-garde manifesto. He examines various mentions
of violence in the Futurist Manifesto as in the second Surrealist Manifesto
(1930) or in Dadaist and Vorticist instances. To specify their usage, the
author analyzes the meaning and function of the word violence by drawing
on political theories at the time of Marinetti. Hjartarson also studies the
metaphors (e.g., brain surgery and sexual imagery) used in Marinetti’s and
subsequent manifestos. All this analysis goes to show that “the text is not
the anticipation of utopia, but a rhetorical act of violence in which the
revolutionary power of a futurized poetic language unfolds itself ” (188).

Illouz, Jean-Nicolas
2005 “Les manifestes symbolistes,” Littérature 139: 93–113.
This article relates the birth of symbolist manifestos to the political events
that took place in French politics from the moment the republic was founded
in 1870 to the 1890s, when it was shaken by political unrest and upheavals.
In their earliest phase, the manifestary forms of symbolism are a form of
literature in an age of permanent revolution and an art that seeks to justify
and redefine itself in order to gain legitimacy in the literary field. Illouz
considers 1886 the only real manifestary year of symbolism: the decade of
 Yanoshevsky • Literary Manifesto and Related Notions 299

the 1870s was the period of formation which led to it, while 1884–85 were
the years when the decadent school became central through various pub-
lications and polemics. In 1884 two publications—Paul Verlaine’s Poètes
maudits and Joris-Karl Huysmans’s A rebours—give the group an ensemble
of common references that underline their dissidence and strengthen their
cohesion. In 1885 there emerged the first polemics between the new school
and the literary critics. According to Illouz, all symbolist publications in
1886, such as Sonnets à Wagner (eight sonnets by Stéphane Mallarmé, Ver-
laine, and others) and Illumination by Arthur Rimbaud, may be regarded as
manifestos, along with Jean Moréas’s canonical manifesto published in Le
figaro (September 18). Illouz emphasizes the role played by literary journals
(Revue wagnérienne, La vogue) and supplements (Le figaro) in creating a move-
ment and producing its manifestos.

Kadir, Djelal, and Ursula K. Heise, eds.

2004 “Crosscurrents: The Art of the Manifesto,” in The Longman Anthology
of World Literature, vol. 6: The Twentieth Century, 21–55 (New York: Pearson
Longman).
The first chapter of this anthology’s volume on the twentieth century is
devoted to the art of the manifesto. This suggests that the editors regard
it as a cornerstone of twentieth-century literature and as an independent
genre. The importance attributed to the manifesto as a genre per se is
further observable in the fact the editors have chosen to separate it from
two other chapters devoted to modernist writing (“Modernist Memory,”
followed by “Modernism and Revolution in Russia”). As to the mani-
festos themselves, the first three included in the anthology reflect a clas-
sical choice of the historical avant-garde (F. P. Marinetti’s “Manifesto of
Futurism” [1909], Tristan Tzara’s “Unpretentious Proclamation” [1919],
André Breton’s “The Surrealist Manifesto” [1924]), while other mani-
festos included echo the anthology’s general intention to present “world
literature.” Thus, the main interest of this chapter lies in its international
scope, covering manifestos that are to be found nowhere else in Western
anthologies: an excerpt of Riichi Yokomitsu’s 1925 essay “New Sensa-
tion Theory,” which spells out the literary program of the Japanese “New
Sensation School”; Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade’s “Canni-
balist Manifesto” (“Manifesto Antropofágico,” 1928), which views Brazil
as devouring foreign culture and producing a revolutionary culture of its
own; an excerpt from “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Litera-
.  Though Mary Ann Caws’s Manifesto: A Century of –isms (listed here) provides a signifi-
cantly wide array of manifestos from various countries and currents, it is basically Euro- and
Western-centric.
300 Poetics Today 30:2

ture” (1917), by the Chinese writer, scholar, and diplomat Hu Shi, who
participated in the May Fourth Movement (a rebellion against traditional
cultural Chinese values). He advocates a vernacular literature as an alter-
native to the ossified forms of expression in the Chinese literary tradition,
based on official, written language.

Lyon, Janet
1991 “Transforming Manifestoes: A Second-Wave Problematic,” Yale Jour-
nal of Criticism 5 (1): 101–27.
Departing from the claim that only a few theoretical studies have been
carried out on the genre of manifesto (101), this essay examines the con-
ventional and historical determinants of the manifesto form in order to
assess its impact on feminist polemics of the last few decades. Lyon is
interested in finding out “whether the manifesto form resists or troubles
feminist speaking-positions and, in particular, in whether or how closely
the manifesto is allied to the voice of hegemonic gender relations” (101–2).
She therefore chooses to focus on the history of the genre’s use, “a history
that is predominantly masculine, and in its ideological exclusion of women
from the public sphere, considerably masculinist” (102). She wants to show
that the manifesto may transmit meanings that are contrary to the aims of
feminist writing. As her primary case study, she chooses a French mani-
festo titled “Combat pour la libération de la femme” (Maoist Journal, Paris,
1970), one of the earliest second-wave feminist manifestos that engaged
in Marxist discourse. From there she moves on to examine later mani-
festos, such as Donna J. Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) and Jenny
Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays (1979–82).

1999 Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press).
Larger in scope than Lyon’s 1991 article, this book offers a history and
a theory of the manifesto by providing a comprehensive synthesis of the
relations among revolutionary discourse, avant-garde aesthetics, feminist
polemics, and the development of modern spheres of public debate and
contestation. The book extends Lyon’s work to the modern public sphere
and examines, among other things, how early prototypes, like the tracts
of the Diggers and Levellers of 1650, evolved into modern incarnations,
such as the 1918 Dada Manifesto and the 1992 Dyke Manifesto. Lyon sug-
gests that “the manifesto as a genre is constitutive of the public sphere
to the degree that it persistently registers the contradictions within mod-
ern political life” (8). The rise of the manifesto, she claims, parallels the
emergence of the bourgeois and plebeian public spheres in the West: start-
 Yanoshevsky • Literary Manifesto and Related Notions 301

ing from the early years of the French Revolution, the 1871 Commune,
Latin American revolutions, and late-nineteenth-century anarchism. The
analysis situates the manifesto within a larger understanding of the emer-
gence of political modernity. It accordingly studies political and aesthetic
manifestos together as reflections of problems of modernity and parts of a
tradition of struggle against dominant forces. As such, the political inter-
sects with the aesthetic avant-garde, and the manifesto plays a role in that
intersection as the “signature genre for avant-garde groups announcing the
birth of artistic movements” (5).

Millot, Hélène
1996 “Arts poétiques, préfaces et manifestes: La légitimation de l’écriture
par le savoir au XIXe siècle,” in Ecriture/savoir: Littérature et connaissance à
l’époque moderne, edited by Alain Vaillant, 205–27 (Saint-Etienne, France:
Printer).
This article relates programmatic texts (ars poetica, preface, and manifesto)
to critical, theoretical, and scholarly discourse on literature. All these
forms, according to Millot, manifest a desire for critical and theoretical
thinking, which is characteristic of modernity. The article examines the
way these programmatic texts address the question of knowledge, either
by viewing writing as a practice that gives rise to a certain knowledge or
by attempting to place literature in the field of knowledge of the time (i.e.,
of modernity).

Perloff, Marjorie
1984 “‘Violence and Precision’: The Manifesto as Art Form,” Chicago Review
34 (2): 65–101.
This article provides an analysis of and background for the Futurist Mani-
festo. Perloff claims that F. T. Marinetti’s reply to Gino Severini’s pro-
jected manifesto, where he urges him to recast his text in firmer terms,
gave birth to “a new genre . . . that might meet the needs of mass audience”
(66). The Futurist Manifesto, she claims, “was a way of aestheticizing what
had traditionally been a vehicle for political statement . . . by creating an
art form designed to erase the traditional line between creation and criti-
cism” (ibid.). By creating a mixed discourse, the futurists anticipated the
“so-called ‘critical texts’ of our own time, texts that are not quite ‘theory’
or ‘poetry’ but that occupy a space between the traditional modes and
genres” (ibid.).
302 Poetics Today 30:2

2003 [1986] The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language
of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
This is a new edition of Perloff ’s 1986 examination of the flourishing of
futurist aesthetics in European art and literature of the early twentieth cen-
tury. The book covers the prose, poetry, visual art, and manifestos of futur-
ists from Russia to Italy. “The language of rupture” refers to ruptures in
form and genre, reflecting the larger desire of the futurists to break down
existing economic and political structures and to transcend nationalist bar-
riers. That language calls into question the genre, the individual medium,
and the line between artist and audience in such related futurist modes as
the manifesto, the artist’s book, and the performance (xviii).
Perloff studies the futurist moment’s influence through the years and
is especially attentive to the way it has penetrated into post-structuralist
thought. For example, Roland Barthes’s definition of the writerly (script-
ible) can be said to pursue “the implications of the doctrine of the Word as
Such, as it is expounded in manifesto after manifesto of the Futurists” (158).
For that matter, his Le degré zéro de l’écriture takes us back to Kasimir Male-
vich’s “zero of form”; and as she argues in the last chapter of the book,
Barthes and other post-structuralist writers often seem to be teasing out
implications already latent in the futurist poetic (ibid.). The updated edi-
tion reexamines the futurist moment in the light of the twenty-first century
and in particular 9/11. It concludes that, whereas in the 1960s and 1970s
a dark and disillusioned version of futurism circulates, today, in view of
terrorism and the threat of war, there is again a place for the futurist ethos
(the worship of technology).

Puchner, Martin
2000 “Screeching Voices: Avant-Garde Manifestos in the Cabaret,” in
European Avant-Garde: New Perspectives, edited by Dietrich Scheunemann,
vol. 15 of Avant Garde Critical Studies, 113–35 (Atlanta: Rodopi:). Can
also be accessed via “The European Avant-Garde: A Reassessment,”
Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association,
Yale University, February 25–27, www.arts.ed.ac.uk/europgstudies/
rprojects/avant-garde/seminar%206.htm (accessed August 22, 2008).
In the article’s first part, Puchner claims that avant-garde’s major project
is to attack the institution of art in an attempt to overcome the distinction
.  Malevich’s project throughout the majority of his artistic life was to rediscover that
original purity: “I have transformed myself in the zero of form,” the artist wrote in 1915,
“and through zero have reached creation, that is, suprematism, the new painterly realism—
­nonobjective creation” (“From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly
Realism, 1915,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934, edited by
John E. Bowlt, 19–41 [London: Thames and Hudson, 1988]).
 Yanoshevsky • Literary Manifesto and Related Notions 303

between art and life. The genre that most successfully accomplishes the
critique of the institution of art is the manifesto. An example is F. T. Mari-
netti’s first Futurist Manifesto in 1909, used as a genre that fulfills a func-
tion in the public, political sphere. For the historical avant-garde, eager to
regain its connection to politics, there is no better way to establish this link
than adopting the overtly political genre of the manifesto.
In the second part of his article, Puchner distinguishes the manifesto
from other forms of expression. Thus he argues that the avant-garde mani-
festo remains distinct from the sphere of avant-garde art, on the one hand,
and from the domain of theory, on the other (119). The manifesto differs
from other avant-garde art forms in that it is ultimately committed to
communication, where other avant-garde forms are often committed to
rupture. It therefore remains in the sphere of political discourse. Nor is
the manifesto a kind of theoretical appendix intended to explain the basic
aesthetics of some movement in a more or less discursive manner (120).
Rather, it differs from the theoretical treatise in its programmatic func-
tion, directed toward a future development. Here Puchner appeals to J. L.
Austin and John Searle’s speech act theory. As opposed to other theoreti-
cal writings, the manifesto is a speech act particularly concerned with the
revolutionary effects it might have on its readers/listeners. For example,
the BLAST Manifesto (1914) of Vorticism is built entirely around a verb
that is at the same time performative, declarative, and directive (121). This
performative aspect of the genre shows itself in the manifesto’s appearance
as a theatrical form.
The preferred avant-garde stage is that of a cabaret, where the use
of voice is dominant. Thus any further attempt to define the theoretical
modes at work in the manifesto, Puchner argues, must take into account
the screeching tone and theatricality of the manifesto (122), to which the
third and last part of the article is devoted. Puchner claims that avant-garde
art derived its screeching voice from the performed manifesto. Hence the
art’s manifesto-like qualities, such as explicitness and directness (127).

2006 Poetry of the Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

The novelty of the book does not reside in the historical review of the
avant-garde manifestos it provides (from the political manifestos of the
nineteenth century to artistic manifestos of the time through the 1960s
and beyond in Italy, Russia, and also Latin America). Rather, its interest
mainly lies in the author’s attempt to explain how and why the manifesto
enters the sphere of art in the early twentieth century. The explanation
appeals to the concepts of “theatricality” (the act of making visible) and
“performativity” (not describing rupture but actively creating it), which
304 Poetics Today 30:2

are alleged to be involved in all manifestos, whether political or artistic.

Theatricality can be identified even in the most classical and most political
specimen, the Communist Manifesto, where the drama of history is mirrored
in the text’s dialogic structure. Beyond the usually enumerated avant-garde
manifestos (of futurism, Dadaism, surrealism), Puchner extends the range
of the genre by inventing a new subcategory, “manifesto art”—that is, art
created in the image of the manifesto or sharing its characteristics (7). The
new grouping covers modernist works, such as collages, plays, poems,
and theatrical performances. Those works are not based “on the doctrines
and theories proclaimed in manifesto, but on the formal influence of the
manifesto, its poetry, on art” and are “aggressive rather than introverted;
screaming rather than reticent; collective rather than individual” (6).
According to Hubert van den Berg, Puchner’s book fills a lacuna in the
Anglophone historiography of the avant-garde. Although some antholo-
gies with avant-garde manifestos have been published in English over the
years, most studies of the topic are in German and French.

Somigli, Luca
2003 Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–
1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
This book is a development of Somigli’s 1996 dissertation (see below). The
latter restricts itself to the strategies of legitimation used by the historical
avant-garde’s manifestos, to futurism in England, and to the formation of
Imagism, while the book is larger in scope. There the author studies the
ordeal of modernity in its European context (France, Italy, England) from
the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury. He explores how artists cope with this period of turmoil, in which the
consolidation of capitalist economy, the formation of the European states,
the advances in science and technology, and the influence of the positivist
paradigm of knowledge profoundly transform the premodern world: the
social institutions, the economic structures, and the communal ideologies
that had governed European cultural and political life until the French
Revolution (4). Somigli describes how the artists of the time attempted
to renegotiate and relegitimate their role in a landscape characterized by
profound social and cultural transformations that throw into question the
place of the arts in society. Faced with the narrowing gap between the art-
work and the product, the artist thus passes from a state of isolation in the
ivory tower of aestheticism to the futurist celebration of technology and
the surrealist attempt to unite aesthetic and political revolution (17). In this
inquiry, Somigli focuses on the genre of the manifesto, which he views as a
textual space ambiguously poised between the aesthetic and the political,
 Yanoshevsky • Literary Manifesto and Related Notions 305

between the work of art and propaganda, between practice and theory. He
considers the manifesto as a site where one can trace the broader debate of
what artists are and do and follow the increasingly antagonistic relation-
ship between artists and their audiences that characterizes much of mod-
ernism and, to a certain extent, of postmodernism.

Vondeling, Johanna E.
2000 “The Manifest Professional: Manifestos and Modernist Legitima-
tion,” College Literature 27 (2): 127–45.
The article reviews the important role played by small journals in legiti-
mizing modernist movements in the light of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory,
which approaches literature from the perspective of economy and the
marketplace. In the highly competitive atmosphere of the 1920s, Vonde-
ling claims, throwaway publications (little magazines, broadsides, and
manifestos) emerged as critical vehicles for introducing modernist writers
and artists to the public. The manifestos published in the little magazines
not only acknowledged the imperative of cultivating a receptive audience,
they also reverted to strategies of self-legitimation, such as redressing the
boundaries between truth and falsity (for instance, claiming that form and
content are separate concerns).
This argument is illustrated from the Anglo-American context.
Examples are Ezra Pound’s and Wyndham Lewis’s essays in the English
journal BLAST. In an attempt to distinguish themselves from movements
in the past, they spoke of F. T. Marinetti’s futurism in the past tense
though adopting some of its rhetorical strategies (“curse,” “blast,” “bless”).
Another example is the poet Mina Loy’s strategy of criticizing the ten-
dency of social institutions to present their percepts as “natural.” While
the agenda of the BLAST Manifesto depended on the editors’ ability to
make the artificial natural, Loy claimed authority by rendering the natural
unnatural. While her early work (“Aphorisms on Futurism” [1914]) mostly
imitated the strategies of Marinetti’s text, she soon developed a more origi-
nal approach to self-legitimation. Her “Feminist Manifesto” of 1914 and her
later essay “International Psycho-Democracy” (both of which appeared
in the Little Review) expressed profound concern with the artist’s relation-
ship to both traditional and rapidly consolidating modernist institutions,
attacking the social institutions that reduce artistic identity to a daily basis
(139). Vondeling draws comparisons among her examples, namely, Mari-
netti’s futurism, Pound’s modernism, and Loy’s feminism. There emerge
both dissimilarities (futurism attempts to capture the energy of technologi-
cal advance in writing, Pound naturalizes his professionalizing strategies,
Loy attacks social institutions) and similarities (Marinetti, Pound, and Loy
306 Poetics Today 30:2

all use typography, redefinition, and discursive intervention to defamiliar-

ize the reader’s ideological assumptions).
The article ends with the conflicting objectives of the little magazine.
It sought to rebel against traditional modes of expression and to circum-
vent the constraints associated with the traditional publishing venues. But
theses primary objectives of the magazines repeatedly conflicted with a
third goal repeatedly expressed in their mastheads: to keep the public
informed about artistic innovation.

Vroon, Ronald
1995 “The Manifesto as a Literary Genre: Some Preliminary Observa-
tions” (Review Article), International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics
38: 163–73.
This is a review article of books published on the manifestos of Russian
futurism and avant-garde with special reference to work in Slavic tongues
and culture. It reviews Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928,
edited by Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1988); and Zabytyj avangard. Rossija, Pervaja tret’ XX stoletija. Sbornik
spravočnyx i teoretičeskix materialov, edited by Konstantin Kuz’minskij, Gerald
Janecek, and Aleksandr Očeretjanskij (Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Alma-
nach, 1988). Following Marjorie Perloff (1986), the manifesto is viewed by
Vroon as a potent tool in the struggle for a cultural revolution in which
the futurists saw themselves engaged (163). It was likewise a form of attack
and counterattack exploited by the assorted groups and subgroups within
the avant-garde but also by opposing schools, particularly those associated
with the various postrevolutionary proletarian movements in literature.
Vroon’s review article briefly surveys anthologies of literary manifestos
of Russian modernism prior to the two volumes examined here. The survey
reveals that the first attempt to collect and publish the major manifestos
of the modern period was made in 1923 by literary critic N. L. Brodskij
in his Literaturnye manifesty. Ot simvolizma k Okjabrju (with a second, fuller
edition in 1929). It also reveals that N. F. Cužak’s Literatura fakta (1929),
the last major production of those who could trace their literary lineages
directly back to the Cubo-futurists, is an anthology devoted exclusively
to materials of a polemical nature. Finally, Vladimir Markov’s pioneer-
ing work (1967) reassembles the literary critical dealings with them in an
anthology entitled Manifesty i programmy russkix futuristov (164–65).
The two volumes under review here, Vroon says, come close to complet-
ing the task begun by Brodskij and continued by Markov with regard to the
futurist and neo-futurist (Russian) avant-garde. Lawton and Eagle’s vol-
 Yanoshevsky • Literary Manifesto and Related Notions 307

ume is in large measure a replication of Markov’s anthology for the period

prior to the revolution, with a few omitted texts and the addition of other
texts relating to postrevolutionary developments in futurism. Vroon also
praises Lawton’s introduction, designed to place the manifestos in their
appropriate historical context. He is complimentary about Eagle’s after-
word, which raises a number of critically important issues concerning the
nature and function of the manifestos (165). According to Vroon, the col-
lection brought together by Kuz’minskij et al. is more modest and eclectic,
though its scope is broader than that of Eagle and Lawton: it includes not
only representatives of the major subgroupings of Russian futurism but
also Constructivists, Suprematists, and others. Further, it collects not only
declarations and programmatic utterances but also exercises in poetic or
literary theory. These source materials will facilitate, in Vroon’s opinion,
the study of the Russian avant-garde and of the relation of Russian futur-
ism to competing avant-garde schools.
In reviewing the texts in these volumes as well as in Brodskij’s and
Markov’s, Vroon claims that one is immediately struck by their formal
and thematic heterogeneity (in length, provenance, form, point of view,
and intended audience). The editors of three of the four anthologies (Brod-
skij, Markov, Lawton and Eagle) attempt to classify these heterogeneous
texts under various categories or genres: manifestos, essays on literature,
resolutions, programmatic declarations, prefaces, and polemical writings.
But none of them attempt to extrapolate an abstract model of the mani-
festo. In fact, Vroon claims, all the editors have avoided it, because the
“genre” is not inherent in the texts (166). Rather, the manifesto’s identity as
such is clearly based on the practical functions it shares with other nonfic-
tive texts, such as “literary essays,” “resolutions,” and the like. Because the
aim of the collections is similarly practical—so Vroon proceeds to argue—
isolating and describing the rhetorical or stylistic properties that distin-
guish the manifesto as a unique verbal construct are matters of secondary
importance. But Vroon considers manifestos worthy as a discursive type:
they do have a specific form, which differs from either poetry or theoretical
writing, and a particular way of inserting the rhetoric of politics into liter-
ary texts.
Finally, Vroon devotes that last part of his review to the impact of the
manifesto on critical theories. In discussing Eagle’s afterword on Cubo-
futurism and formalism, he pays special attention to the idea advanced by
Eagle concerning the symbiotic relationship between the manifesto and
formalist literary criticism.
308 Poetics Today 30:2

Winkiel, Laura
2006 “The Rhetoric of Violence: Avant-Garde Manifestoes and the Myths
of Racial Community,” in The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-
Garde (1906– 1940), edited by Sascha Bru and Gunther Martens, 65–90
(Amsterdam: Rodopi).
Winkiel relates Enlightenment to avant-garde discourse. First, the former
seems to be universal yet applies to Western society only while discrimi-
nating against others: it in effect justifies colonization and trade to the
benefit of nascent Anglo-European republics and monarchies. The latter,
and particularly the manifesto genre, transmits the racial contradictions of
Enlightenment discourse to the modern period despite the avant-garde’s
ostensible stance against Enlightenment rationality. Second, Winkiel
claims that the avant-garde manifesto’s racial discourse animates newly
aestheticized forms of modern political communities. Just as philosophies
of modernity depended on racialized difference to construct the modern
subject and community, so did the manifesto genre of the time. It used
racial myths to ground its creation of communities, which break with the
past in order to realize their liberties, and this often depended on “rec-
ognizing” community and its destiny in racial terms. For instance, two
very different political orientations—the ultranationalism of futurism and
Vorticism and the anarchic, “unworkable” impulse of Dadaism—hinge on
racial myths to constitute their communities (69). Thus F. T. Marinetti’s
Futurist Manifesto published in Le figaro (1909), while being international
in its appeal for cosmopolitan artists, is also heavily national in its cele-
bration of national mobilization in wartime emergency (72). By contrast,
Dada, as formulated by Tristan Tzara in his “Seven Dada Manifestoes”
(1924), advocates a will to disorder, including the crossing of racial bound-
aries in an anarchic art that deconstructs axioms of logical thinking, and
so endorses African art as a stark and mythic, ritualized space of aesthetic
production (77–78).
Winkiel ends her article with a brief analysis of later anticolonial
avant-garde manifestos, where the contradictions of race and modernity,
she claims, are explicitly addressed. She studies surrealist manifestos by
Suzanne Césaire and Aimé Césaire (Aimé Césaire’s “In the Guise of a Lit-
erary Manifesto” [1942] and “Notebook of a Return to My Native Land”
[1947], and Suzanne Césaire’s “Surrealism and Us” [1943]), which com-
bine history with myth to combat organicist theories of nationalism (83).
 Yanoshevsky • Literary Manifesto and Related Notions 309

Yanoshevsky, Galia
2003 “The Significance of Rewriting; or, Pour un nouveau roman as the Mani-
festo of the Nouveau Roman,” Journal of Romance Studies 3 (3): 43–54.
This article views the Nouveau Roman’s manifesto Pour un nouveau roman
(1963) as the result of a process of rewriting of previous articles by Alain
Robbe-Grillet and by his critics, articles that were originally published in
the daily newspapers and literary journals of the time. The rewriting pro-
cess involved omissions and insertions of references to Nathalie Sarraute,
Robbe-Grillet’s predecessor as leader of the Nouveau Roman, and to his
critics (Roland Barthes and others); changes in vocabulary; and new for-
mulations motivated by the collection of the articles into a single volume
published almost a decade after the first column had appeared in the press.
The stages of a literary movement’s formation—from its inception to its
institutionalization—are thus embedded in the processing of its ideas and
their appearance in various discourse forms, from the newspaper column
to the manifesto.

2006 Les discours du Nouveau Roman. Essais, entretiens, débats (Lille, France:
Presses universitaires du Septentrion).
Unlike the 2003 article, which focuses on a specific aspect of Alain Robbe-
Grillet’s manifesto of the Nouveau Roman, namely, the process by which it
became one, the book undertakes a comprehensive study of various types
of discourses that characterize the Nouveau Roman: literary essays, inter-
views, and debates. Through these discourses, the author claims, one can
trace the Nouveau Roman’s different stages, from its inception as a myth
of the press to its eventual institutionalization. Thus the book falls into
three parts, each devoted to one type of discourse (essay, interview, debate)
as it manifests itself from the 1950s to the 1980s. The book develops the
author’s 2003 dissertation (see below), especially in the third and last part,
which integrates the study of literary debates within a new perspective on
the micro-sociology of literature.
The first part of the book, which is of most interest to scholars of the
manifesto, examines the rewriting of newspaper articles into published
essays in literary journals. For example, Robbe-Grillet’s columns in Le
nouvel observateur and L’express find their way to the journals La nouvelle revue
française, Critique, Revue de Paris, Revue de l’institut de sociologie de Bruxelles, and
Tel Quel. These articles in turn are published in a collection that is taken
as a manifesto by literary critics of the time and by later generations. Such
is the case not only with Robbe-Grillet’s Pour un nouveau roman (1963) but
also with Nathalie Sarraute’s L’ere du soupçon. Published in 1956, it contains
journal articles that previously appeared in Temps modernes or the Nouvelle
310 Poetics Today 30:2

nouvelle revue française. Yanoshevsky puts a special emphasis on how the col-
lection becomes one worth being considered a manifesto by the critics (the
addition of prefaces, epigraphs, the rewriting of certain parts, and the like)
and also points out the role played by critics in the reception of the text as
such.

Dissertations Related to the Manifesto

Amidon, Stevens Russell

2003 “Manifestoes: A Study in Genre.” PhD diss., University of Rhode
Island.
This dissertation is a study of the manifesto as a genre by references to
contemporary theories of social reproduction. Tracing the manifesto back
to Martin Luther’s “95 Theses,” it advances therefrom to political mani-
festos (The Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants (1525), Manifesto of the
Communist Party (1848) by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx), to the aesthetic
manifestos of modernism, and finally, to manifestos of critique (Virginia
Woolf, Frank O’Hara, and others). The manifesto is conceived of as a pro-
cess rather than an object for taxonomy.

Burger, Marcel
1996 “L’enjeu identitaire: Pour une pragmatique du psychsociale; Une ana-
lyse du manifeste du surréalisme d’André Breton.” PhD diss., Geneva
University.
This dissertation studies the question of identity. It examines the case of
surrealism’s first manifesto, written by André Breton (1924), in light of a
theory of identity developed in the first part of the dissertation. According
to Burger, one should speak of a co-construction of identity in the mani-
festo, since that identity depends on a social recognition that is hardly
ever given in advance but rather produced through the interaction of the
communicating subjects. The dissertation is composed of two parts. The
first is a general approach, not limited to manifestos, to the question of
identity (“L’enjeu identitaire”). Thus Burger distinguishes levels of the co-
construction of identity by the communicating subjects via examples taken
from different contexts of communication (e.g., the political debate or the

.  On March 6, 1525, about fifty representatives of the Upper Swabian peasant groups
met in Memmingen to deliberate upon their common stance against the Swabian League.
One day later, after difficult negotiations, they proclaimed the Christian Association, an
Upper Swabian peasants’ confederation. After some additional deliberation, they adopted
the Twelve Articles and the Federal Order (Bundesordnung). The Twelve Articles of the Black
Forest were part of the peasants’ demands vis-à-vis the Swabian League in the war of 1525.
They are considered to be the first record of human rights in Europe.
 Yanoshevsky • Literary Manifesto and Related Notions 311

interview). His major hypothesis is that this construct emerges from (a) the
relation between the identities expected by a certain type of social and
communicational activity, (b) the identities relevant to a specific project,
and (c) the actual communicational behavior of the participants. This part
also includes a micro-textual analysis of the strategies used in face-to-face
interactions where identity is clearly at stake. The second part of the dis-
sertation is entirely devoted to Breton’s 1924 manifesto as a case study of
the problem of identity. Here the manifesto is examined as a whole and
compared with manifestos—political and literary—that precede the his-
torical avant-garde. The last chapter analyzes the identity construction
strategies specific to Breton’s manifesto, those that enabled him, according
to Burger, to create a “typically Surrealist identity” (2).

Encke, Jeffrey M.
2002 “Manifestos: A Social History of Proclamation.” PhD diss., Colum-
bia University.
This dissertation inquires how an author’s name can contribute to the
formation of a genre. It studies what may be considered formal prece-
dents of the modern manifesto (catechisms, professions of faith, Renais-
sance poetic apologies). It also draws upon Manifesto of the Communist Party
(1848) as a model for later manifestos. The dissertation includes examples
associated with American avant-garde from its beginnings (the poet Frank
O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto,” written in 1959 and published in
1961) to postmodernism (Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto [1967]). It
explores the relationship among surveillance, paranoid culture, and acts
of “manifesting.”

Heimpel, Rod S.
1996 “Généalogie du manifeste littéraire.” PhD diss., University of
Toronto.
The author examines the literary manifesto from a genealogical point of
view. It emerges as a multiple and complex phenomenon related to the
way it is perceived (that is, there is no one significance but as many meanings
as there are perspectives of the thing). Thus the manifesto owes its exis-
tence to the various perspectives of the political or literary institutions that
take it over. Critical discourse, viewed as an integral part of the institution,
plays a role in determining those perspectives.
Contrary to the title of the dissertation, which singles out the literary
variety of manifesto, Heimpel claims here that the political manifesto is

.  SCUM stands for Society for Cutting Up Men.

312 Poetics Today 30:2

not an entity or genre separate from the literary manifesto but rather a
specific institutional aspect of it. Thus according to the author, one can-
not view the literary manifesto as simply an offshoot of the political one.
Rather, the history of the manifesto (which Heimpel dubs “la chose mani-
festaire”) starts from fuzzy and equivocal “origins,” where the literary and
the political intermix.
Heimpel approaches the manifesto, whether political or literary, as a
genre with specific discursive features. Contrary to some of his predeces-
sors, whom he critically reviews in the introduction to his thesis, Heimpel
refuses to remain within what he calls an external “historical” reading (like
Joachim Schultz) or a structural/typological reading (like Jeanne Demers
and Line Mc Murray). Instead, he opts for a generic study of the mani-
festo, where all the various aspects usually considered as external (diach-
rony, the author, literary criticism) are perceived as an integral part of the
text. In Gérard Genette’s terms, the genre (here the manifesto) is viewed as
a seuil (threshold) in the sense that it is composed of a material that needs
to be interpreted. Heimpel thus undertakes a paratextual study of the
manifesto: titles, signatures, and prefaces are examined in order to locate
the author but also to figure out the various perspectives and speech acts
that made it possible for the text to survive through time. For example, he
studies the various editions that Tristan Tzara’s manifestos went through
or the titles of manifestos during the Bell Epoque (1886–1914). Lastly and
in accordance with his hypothesis that a manifesto is created not only by its
“authors” but also by its critics, Heimpel analyzes studies of what he calls
the “acts of signature” that critics perform in prefaces, for example, or in
criticism published elsewhere. A case in point is Charles Augustin Sainte-
Beuve’s nineteenth-century retrospect on Joachim Du Bellay’s La défense et
illustration de la langue française (1549), which helped establish the latter as a
manifesto.

Hutchisson, James Marvin

1987 “Paper Wars: The Literary Manifesto in America.” PhD diss., Uni-
versity of Delaware.
This dissertation studies in chronological order about fifty selected literary
manifestos published by American writers from approximately 1800 to the
present. These manifestos express a variety of opinions on how American
literature should be written and what it should represent. Manifesto is here
defined as a document that is hortatory in tone and intended (or comes to

.  He offers a short critique of Joachim Schultz’s Literarische Manifeste des “Belle Epoque,”
Frankreich 1886–1909. Versuch einer Gattungsbestimmung (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1981) and of
Demers and Mc Murray 1986 (see above).
 Yanoshevsky • Literary Manifesto and Related Notions 313

be known) as a pronouncement upon the condition of American letters. It

is not necessarily a work of literary criticism (4). Taken as a whole, these
documents constitute a record of aesthetic quarrels, which have occurred
in every period of American literary history. For example, Hutchisson dis-
cusses the journal of the Anthology Club (founded by William Emerson
in 1804), the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review: it contained the earliest
manifestos that triggered public debate among the literati on how to estab-
lish a national literature. Or in 1880 William Dean Howells initiated a bit-
ter international quarrel over realism in his review of Henry James’s Haw-
thorne when he assumed (at least for rhetorical purposes) that nationality in
American literature had been attained. The investigation of these “paper
wars” yields abundant evidence with which to determine the continuity or
discontinuity over time of American writers’ aesthetic ideologies and the
relative importance of creating and fostering an American literary culture.
In examining these proclamations, the dissertation also seeks to answer the
persistent question of what makes American literature peculiarly “Ameri-
can” and how writers’ criteria for the nationality of an American fiction
and poetry have changed.

Lefebvre, Richard
2003 “La rhétorique du manifeste (Karl Marx, Francois-Noel Babeuf,
Jean-Francois Varlet).” PhD diss., University of Montreal.
This dissertation is an analysis of the rhetorical process in about a hundred
manifestos mainly published in two French sociopolitical contexts. One
belongs to the seventeenth century, namely, the rebellion of the French
nobility against the government of the queen mother Marie de Médicis
(1614–17) and the first uprising of Protestants under the rule of Louis XIII
(1619–22); the other, located in the eighteenth century, is the sequence of
revolutionary episodes that occurred between the summoning of the Gen-
eral Estates by Louis XVI (1788) and the 18 Brumaire (1799). To this Lefeb-
vre has added the analysis of Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Mani-
festo (1848) as a model for many subsequent manifestos.
The research focuses on the mediation of language and discursive forms
associated with politics. Here lies its difference from historical studies of
manifestos concerned with political doctrines and from literary studies
that have neglected the political manifesto or applied to it analytical tools
suitable for fiction. Lefebvre’s introduction lists such tools as discourse
analysis, speech act theories, theories of communication, cultural theories,
and sociological theories interested in the institution of literature. Draw-
ing on Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, the dissertation attempts to
develop a theory of the manifesto based on a large corpus that has been
314 Poetics Today 30:2

systematically scrutinized. Among the aspects subjected to this analysis are

the mode of production in printing and political, judicial, and philosophi-
cal conceptions that divide the polemical field but also syntactic organi-
zation and agency (“subject positions”). Lefebvre concludes that, from a
historical perspective, the manifesto form, unlike related forms (the “pro-
testation,” the “doléance,” and the “remonstrance”) that remained asso-
ciated with the feudal regime, managed to survive the destruction of the
Old Regime in France, and have become ever since a vital tool of political
parties that claimed to represent the masses (vii). The author defines the
rhetorical characteristics of the various types of political manifesto: nar-
ration in the judicial-type manifestos, storytelling in the deliberative type,
and declaration and exhortation in almost all types.

Reddaway, Darlene Lynn

2002 “The Political Form and Figures of Russian Futurism: Manifestos
and Media Blitz, 1908–1914.” PhD diss., Stanford University.
Reddaway systematically investigates the prerevolutionary phase of the
Russian futurist movement (1908–14), taking the polemics expressed in its
manifestos and media campaign as the organizing principle. According
to Reddaway, the reason the Cubo-futurists managed to dominate over
other trends within futurism (like the ego-futurists) is that they had a grasp
of the new and modern era that enabled them to wage a victorious cam-
paign. Thus their manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912),
marked a turning point in the movement of Russian futurism, combining
its approach to its art, its criticism, and its public with the practices of
the burgeoning new “industries” of mass advertisement, entertainment,
and politics (1). The manifesto, a familiar political form, thus served the
futurist groups who wanted to take their internal political warfare to the
streets and appeal to the public for approval and for the resolution of their
conflicts. A close chronological reading of manifesto and media texts is
undertaken in the context of critical and reader response to the futurists’
claims as expressed in newspaper and journal articles. This reading makes
it possible to reconstruct the dynamics of the personal relationships, the
ambitions, the declarations, and the public relation tactics that drove the
beginning phase of the Russian futurist movement.

Somigli, Luca
1996 “Towards a Theory of the Avant-Garde Manifesto.” PhD diss., State
University of New York at Stony Brook.
This dissertation intervenes in the theoretical and historiographic debate
on the avant-garde by foregrounding the role performed by manifestos in
 Yanoshevsky • Literary Manifesto and Related Notions 315

the production, circulation, and reception of avant-garde works. The rela-

tive novelty of manifestos (an unstable genre poised between politics and
aesthetics and between exposition and exhortation) makes them the avant-
garde genre par excellence (4). In the manifestos, we can see the unfolding
of the dialogue and the debate among the European avant-garde move-
ments, which defend their differences from one another at the same time
that they take advantage of the same discursive tools. The author exam-
ines the rhetorical and discursive strategies of manifesto writing to show
how the genre becomes the textual site where avant-garde movements con-
struct themselves as a moment of radical rupture. Other chapters examine
the manifestos of specific movements, such as Italian futurism (chapter 2),
English Imagism and Vorticism (chapter 3), and Dadaism and surrealism
(chapter 4).

Yanoshevsky, Galia
2003 “Les discours du nouveau roman, essais, entretiens, débats: Le cas
de Nathalie Sarraute et d’Alain Robbe-Grillet.” PhD diss., Tel Aviv
University.
The first chapter of this dissertation is a close reading of the New Novel’s
two book-length manifestos: Nathalie Sarraute’s L’ere du soupçon (1956) and
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Pour un nouveau roman (1963). It attempts to discover
why these two essay collections are viewed by critics as the manifestos of
a literary movement, the Nouveau Roman, despite the fact they were not
explicitly declared to be such by their authors. The answer given lies in the
genesis of the material. These texts underwent numerous transformations
in their writing and publication alike—from the literary column in the
newspaper, through the literary journal, to the final versions as collected
articles (1956 and 1963, respectively, for Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet). In
the transformative process, a dialogue was established between the writ-
ings of these two founders of the Nouveau Roman as well as between them
and their critics. That dialogue is in turn reflected in the rewriting of vari-
ous segments of the texts. Also the act of collecting the texts and publishing
them in a book, at a moment when the Nouveau Roman was being insti-
tutionalized, accounts for either volume’s consideration as a manifesto by
the critics.