The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture After the Avant-Garde

Theorising the "poetic turn" in cultural discourse from the post-War era to the present, The Organ Grinder's Monkey meditates on the post-avant-garde condition mapped out in the work of an international roster of artists, writers, philosophers and film-makers, from Abstract Expressionism to the New Media, including Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard, Cy Twombly, Jacques Derrida, Rosalind Krauss, Samuel Becket, Katherine Hayles, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, Alain Badiou, Dusan Makavejev, Marjorie Perloff, Michael Dransfield, Charles Olson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Veronique Vassiliou, Guy Debord, Joshua Cohen, Pierre Joris, Philippe Sollers, Karen Mac Cormack, Marshall McLuhan, Lukas Tomin, John Kinsella, Zadie Smith and Vincent Farnsworth. Louis Armand directs the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University, Prague. He has edited Contemporary Poetics (Northwestern, 2006), Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde under 'Post-' Conditions (LPB, 2006) and Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics (2010). He is the author of Literate Technologies: Language, Cognition, Technicity (2006) and Event States: Discourse, Time, Mediality. Armand is the author of seven collections of poetry and five novels, most recently Breakfast at Midnight (2012) and Canicule (2013), both from Equus (London). His work has been included in the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry and Best Australian Poems and a screenplay, Clair Obscur, received honourable mention at the 2009 Alpe Adria Trieste International Film Festival. He edits VLAK magazine.