What makes avant-garde avant-garde?

[Malignd]

<<The concept of invention, evolution and revolution
in art and literature still has purpose. ... I would
hazard to say that if such a concept "seems now
precious, even ludicrous" that we are saying
literature is dead; or at least in code awaiting the
defibrillation of genius.>>

I'm sorry; I was speaking specifically of the term
"avant garde," its historic echoes and any current
work that grows out of that or uses that term.  

There's nothing ludicrous, certainly, in the idea of
the new, of change, of evolution, etc., although I
think it may be a trap to believe that literature is
dead without change of this sort.  (The novel has been
in its death throes for some long time.)

Robert Coover has been pretty vocal about hypertext,
interractive narration, etc.; Richard Romeo could
probably talk about this some.

If, as has been said (although to my knowledge never
definitively), Sebald was writing fiction, then I
think what he was up to was different and powerful in
the sense you're asking about.  (It's powerful in any
case.)  

Generally, though, it seems we're at the end of a
period of narrative experimentation or, if not the
end, the most noted practictioners of it are getting
old or are dead:  Barth, Barthelme, Nabokov, Borges,
Coover, Calvino, Pynchon, Roth, Delillo; the usual
suspects, the early postmoderns, in other words.  

Garcia-Marquez was glorious, but the stuff by the
writers he's inspired is generally pretty painful.

I have no real conclusions.  Someone else might want
to pick this up.

  




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