School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemTheoretrical avant-gardes and avant-garde theories: toward the sociology of an academic art culture( 2010)Beginning not with the question "What is avant-garde film?" but instead "How is it that this question has come to be asked in the university and who can legitimately ask it?" the theme of this study is the symbolic production over the last four decades of avant-garde cinema, to be understood here both as a specialised field of position-takings and a socio-occupational identity. Such a task is necessarily too large in scope to complete in a single study so I have here limited myself to definitions and symbolic productions of avant-garde film circulated by social agents (artists, critics and theorists) within higher education for the most part in Britain over the preceding four decades, where in any case, this form has found its strongest affiliations and where the relay of position-takings has been most restive. Drawing on the research of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault on correspondences between artistic or cultural taxonomies and social class stratifications, on the importance of education in the whole process of cultural reproduction, and on the genealogy of ideas, discourses, and professions, this thesis situates the study and teaching of the avant-garde both at the core of the origins of film studies in higher education and as a central and inextricable component of the discourse of film theory. Following this hypothesis, a gradual institutional fusion is traced from the mid 1960s to the 1970s of two currents - the artistic, theoretical avant-garde and the avant-garde, quasi-artistic theorists - which are customarily historicised as separate instances and which, although fading from the higher education agenda from the early 1980s onwards, are argued to provide long-enduring institutional identities and broadly inclusive discursive constituents. I have also broadened this study of symbolic production to include a review of a whole array of pedagogic consequences and results of the original grouping of art education and media studies under the same institutional, discursive, and occupational sign.