Key Avant-Garde Movements of the 20th Century

Futurism: Speed, Dynamism, and Technology

Founded by Marinetti, Futurism proclaimed a complete break with the past and tradition. It glorified war, magnified sport, speed, dynamism, technical inventions, and adventure, expressing a worship of the "I" and youth.

Literary Techniques of Futurism:

• Destruction of syntax (using the infinitive verb form as the only valid tense).
• Elimination of the adjective and the adverb.
• Abolition of punctuation and capitalization.
• Use of arithmetic signs and musical words.
• Emphasis on absolute freedom of expression.

Cubism: Intellectual Art and Literary Collage

Cubism was born as a pictorial art movement in Paris. It was an intellectual movement requesting the participation of the spectator, who had to mentally reconstruct the work. It soon became literary, primarily poetic (led by Apollinaire). Key themes included humanitarianism and internationalist pacifism.

Literary Techniques of Cubism:

• Application of the collage in literature, using different prints.
• Use of the calligram (visual poetry).
• Disappearance of logical links within the sentence structure.

Dadaism: Anarchy, Chance, and Rejection of Reason

Dadaism was the most radical movement among the avant-gardes. Its name is often attributed to the babbling of a child who has not yet spoken, or the result of choosing a single syllable randomly by opening a dictionary with a knife. Dadaism promoted an anarchist attitude, exalting the free and independent "I," constantly denying traditional morality, and violently rejecting rationality. It defended spontaneity, chance, and madness.

Dadaist Literary Techniques:

• Influences from Futurism and Cubism.
• Automatic invention of writing, aiming to express the inner world with total spontaneity, almost without the intervention of reason.

Surrealism: Dreams, Psychoanalysis, and Suprareality

Surrealism was the heir to the most intelligent aspects of Dadaism. It sought to reach the hidden knowledge of reality—a suprareality—the background of human subjectivity. The access roads to this hidden reality were dreams. The movement was heavily influenced by psychoanalysis and automatic writing.

Led by André Breton, Surrealism became the strongest and most influential of the avant-gardes. It went through two periods: an initial phase that was essentially literary and artistic, and a second phase focused more on moral art. Surrealism was organized as a closed, hierarchical group; notable figures included Dalí and Buñuel.

The movement saw an obvious decline from 1939 onward. By 1945, when Breton returned from exile, Existentialism had taken over the cultural and literary landscape.

Surrealist Characteristics:

• Use of automatic writing.
• Association of words and images.
• Defense of hallucinatory distortion.
• Use of anaphora and other rhetorical devices.