The Dada movement, revered as perhaps the purest form of cultural subversion and provocation in 20th-century Europe, has been a victim of the readiness with which cultural historians have swallowed its own propaganda. Based on extensive close analysis of French-language Dada work in its original form, and offering English translations throughout, this major reappraisal looks at a broad range of media and topics - including poetry, film, philosophy, and quantum physics - in order to get beyond Dada's typecasting as avant-garde anti-hero. Work by women writers and other marginalized figures combines with that of canonical Dadaists to present Dada in a radically new set of guises: poetic and textually subtle; intellectually and philosophically meaningful; peaceable and quasi-Buddhist; and, perhaps most uncomfortably of all, conformist and reactionary.

How Dada is to break its cultural accommodation and containment today necessitates thinking the historical instances through revised application of critical and theoretical models. The volume Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde moves precisely by this motive, bringing together writings which insist upon the continuity of the early twentieth-century moment now at the start of the twenty-first. Engaging the complex and contradictory nature of Dada strategies, instanced in the linguistic gaming and performativity of the movement’s initial formation, and subsequently isolating the specific from the general with essays focusing on Ball, Tzara, Serner, Hausmann, Dix, Heartfield, Schwitters, Baader, Cravan and the exemplary Duchamp, the political philosophy of the avant-garde is brought to bear upon our own contemporary struggle through critical theory to comprehend the cultural usefulness, relevance, validity and effective (or otherwise) oppositionality of Dada’s infamous anti-stance. The volume is presented in sections that progressively point towards the expanding complexity of the contemporary engagement with Dada, as what is often exhaustive historical data is forced to rethink, realign and reconfigure itself in response to the analytical rigour and exercise of later twentieth-century animal anarchic thought, the testing and cultural placement of thoughts upon the virtual, and the eventual implications for the once blissfully unproblematic idea of expression. From the opening, provocative proposition that historically Dada may have been the falsest of all false paths, the volume rounds to dispute such condemnation as demarcation continues not only of Dada’s embeddedness in western culture, but more precisely of the location of Dada culture. Ten critical essays – by Cornelius Partsch, John Wall, T. J. Demos, Anna Schaffner, Martin I. Gaughan, Curt Germundson, Stephen C. Foster, Dafydd Jones, Joel Freeman and David Cunningham – are supplemented by the critical bibliography prepared by Timothy Shipe, which documents the past decade of Dada scholarship, and in so doing provides a valuable resource for all those engaged in Dada studies today.

Offering new critical approaches to Dada as quintessential part of the Avant-Garde, Dada and Existentialism: the Authenticity of Ambiguity reassesses the movement as a form of (proto-) Existentialist philosophy. Dada is often dismissed as an anti-art movement with a merely destructive theoretical impetus. French Existentialism is often condemned for its perceived quietist implications. However, closer analysis reveals a preoccupation with philosophy in the former and with art in the latter. Moreover, neither was nonsensical or meaningless; both reveal a rich individualist ethics aimed at the amelioration of the individual and society. The first major comparative study of Dada and Existentialism, this text contributes new perspectives on Dada as movement, historical legacy, and field of study. Analysing Dada works through Existentialist literature across the themes of choice, alienation, responsibility, freedom and truth, the text posits that Dada and Existentialism both advocate the creation of a self that aims for authenticity through ambiguity.

Wireless Dada: Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-Garde demonstrates that the poetics of the Dada movement was profoundly influenced by the telegraph and the technological and social transformations that it brought about in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While telegraphy’s impact on Italian Futurism and German Expressionism is widely acknowledged, its formative role in Dada poetics has been largely neglected. Drawing on media history and theory, avant-garde studies, and German literary studies, Kurt Beals shows how the telegraph and the cultural discourses that surrounded it shaped the radical works of this seminal avant-garde movement. The “nonsense” strain in Dada is frequently seen as a response to the senseless violence of the First World War. Beals argues that it was not just the war that turned Dada poetry into a jumble of senseless signals—it was also the wireless.

Developing a reading of modernist poetics centred on the three-way relationship between literature, modern physics and avant-garde art movements, this book focuses on four key poets – William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Wallace Stevens – whose lives crossed paths in 20th-century New York. This book explores how modernist art movements have shaped these writers' thinking about physics in relation to their work, demonstrating how science's new ideas about measurement and how to visualize material reality provoked innovative poetic forms and images. From Einstein's visit to New York City in 1921 to the impact of the atomic bomb, the author traces the flow of ideas about physics through culture, linking the new physics with modern approaches to art found in Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.

Dada’s Subject and Structure argues that Dadaist praxis was far more theoretically incisive than previous scholarship has indicated. The book combines theoretical frameworks surrounding ideological subject formation with critical media and genre histories in order to more closely read Dadaist techniques (e.g. montage, irony, nonsense, etc.) across multiple works. These readings reveal both Dada’s preternatural focus on the discursive aspects of subject formation—linguistic sign, literary manifesto, photographic image, commodity form/aesthetics, which comprise the project’s chapters—and on Dada’s performative sabotage and subversion of them. In addition to highlighting commonalities between Dadaist works, artists, and chapters previously imagined disparate, the book shows how Dada simultaneously prefigured structuralist theories of subject formation and pre-performed post-structuralist critiques of those theories.

Dada is often celebrated for its strategies of shock and opposition, but in Dada Presentism, Maria Stavrinaki provides a new picture of Dada art and writings as a lucid reflection on history and the role of art within it. The original (Berlin-based) Dadaists' acute historical consciousness and their modern experience of time, she contends, anticipated the formulations of major historians such as Reinhart Koselleck and, more recently, François Hartog. The book explores Dada temporalities and concepts of history in works of art, artistic discourse, and in the photographs of the Berlin Dada movement. These photographs—including the famous one of the First International Dada Fair—are presented not as simple, transparent documents, but as formal deployments conforming to a very concrete theory of history. This approach allows Stavrinaki to link Dada to more contemporary artistic movements and practices interested in history and the archive. At the same time, she investigates what seems to be a real oxymoron of the movement: its simultaneous claim to the ephemeral and its compulsive writing of its own history. In this way, Dada Presentism also interrogates the limits between history and fiction.