4 Dada Suicides: Selected Texts of Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma & Jacques Vache (Anti-Classics of Dada) - Softcover

Rigaut, Jacques; Torma, Julien; Vache, Jacques

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9780947757748: 4 Dada Suicides: Selected Texts of Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma & Jacques Vache (Anti-Classics of Dada)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0947757740 ISBN 13: 9780947757748

Publisher: Atlas Pr, 1995

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This book collects together works by four "writers" on the fringes of the Dada movement in 1920's Paris.
These four took the nihilism of the movement to its ultimate conclusion, their works are remnants of lives lived to the limit and then cast aside with nonchalance and abandon: Vache died of a drug overdose, Rigaut shot himself, Cravan and Torma simply vanished, their fates still a mystery. Yet their fragmentary works - to which they attached so little importancestill exert a powerful allure and were a vital inspiration for the literary movements that followed them. Vache's bitter humour, Cravan's energetic invective, Rigaut's dandyfied introspection, and Torma's imperturbable asperity: all had their influence.
This collection contains biographical introductions to each author as well as personal recollections by their contemporaries.

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Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

From Publishers Weekly:

It is said of Cravan, the self-proclaimed poet and boxer, that he "put all of his genius into his life." All four of the writers here were, in a way, performance artists, with their art being their lives?complete with dramatic finale. Rigaut shot himself in the heart. Vache overdosed on opium, and both Cravan and Torma vanished without a trace. Which isn't to say their lives didn't influence Dada, the short-lived, professionally disruptive approach or the Surrealists who followed. None of the writers here was prolific: a result, no doubt, of short lives, wartime interruptions, the time and energy needed create personae and the difficulty involved in writing to suit a philosophy devoted to destroying art and literature. By and large, the choppy prose reveals the preoccupation with word games, undermining poetic norms and epater le bourgeois and is most valuable for the window it gives on the movement and its anti-art, freedom-at-all-costs inspiration. The works show a quirky, egocentric, tongue-in-cheek style, the kind that, by the sheer force of its outrage, created a new way of looking at the world and defined a literary era.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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