Was there a sudden break in the world of art, literature, and music when modernism gave way to postmodernism?

Philip Nel attacks the notion of tremendous and sudden change in artistic understanding and literary practice. Instead, in The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks he proposes that a series of small but far-reaching changes drew understanding from modernism to postmodernism.

What bonds these two periods together? The constant agent of change, Nel argues, was the avant-garde. Tracking its influence on novelists, popular culture figures, and children's authors, this book re-evaluates how twentieth-century culture has been traditionally divided into modern and postmodern.

Suggesting that a modernism and postmodernism division prevents accurate evaluation of a work, Nel realigns our conceptions of twentieth-century literature, art, and music. Focusing on eight figures--Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Dr. Seuss, Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Chris Van Allsburg, Laurie Anderson, and Leonard Cohen--as representative, The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks examines works along a spectrum of political involvement.

This first book to analyze postmodern children's literature revives the radical Dr. Seuss by reading him alongside avant-garde artists. Nel argues that Chris Van Allsburg speaks the internet generation's vernacular, using a surrealist idiom to pose questions that linger beyond his picture books' final pages.

The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks is a nuanced and wide-ranged re-reading of how postmodernism displays art's ability to imagine a better world.

Philip Nel is an assistant professor of English at Kansas State University. He is the author of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter Novels: A Reader's Guide. He has been published in Children's Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-210) and index.

Introduction : the historical avant-garde and twentieth-century America — America meets the avant-garde : Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, and the 1930s — Dada knows best : growing up surreal with Dr. Seuss — Some of us had been threatening our friend postmodernism : Donald Barthelme and the historical avant-garde — "Amid the undeniable power of the montage" : modern forms, postmodern politics, and the role of the avant-garde in Don DeLillo's Underworld — Just a dream? : Chris Van Allsburg and surrealism at the end of the twentieth century — Pop goes the avant-garde : Laurie Anderson's and Leonard Cohen's music for the masses — Conclusion : In-a-gadda-da-Oswald : Photoshop and the politics of ambiguity.