The dates of Modernism are disputable, it can be rightly claimed that nascent Modernism budded with the Avant-Garde (a military metaphor, meaning ‘advance guard’) which refers to a small, self-conscious group of artists and authors who deliberately undertook, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, to “make it new”.

By violating the accepted conventions and proprieties, not only of art but of social discourse, they set out to create ever-new artistic forms and styles and to introduce hitherto neglected and sometimes forbidden subject matter. These artists frequently represented themselves as alienated from the established order, against which they asserted their own autonomy; a prominent aim was to shock the sensibilities of the conventional reader and challenge the norms and pieties of the dominant bourgeoisie culture.

这些艺术家寻求完全破裂的传统，拒绝了所有绝对的美学惯例，标准和口味的考虑，并以知识嬉戏，偶像质，不受欢迎和神秘化的崇拜为特征，所有这些都是现代主义作家的特征。这个军事政治术语的采用是作家的自我意识极端主义的一种表达，这是一种极端主义，旨在加速审美和社会传统的破坏，以便将艺术和社会进一步推向未来。

文化及其规范被视为一种人为的安排，要颠覆，模仿和违反。冲击战术和各种反艺术手势（马塞尔·杜尚（Marcel Duchamp）的“现成”，例如La Fontaine– a urinal signed R. Mutt) were used to shake the public out of its torpid acceptance of outmoded values. Avant Garde art decomposed old frames of reference and broke the implicit correspondence between ‘good taste’ and ‘good art’. The avant garde aesthetic was characterized by a defamiliarization of the accepted cultural order; it valued fragments, curious collections and unexpected juxtapositions — erotic, exotic, incongruous and unconscious. The notion of art as representation was subverted:BretonandAragonin the novel and poetry;阿尔弗雷德·贾里（Alfred Jarry）in drama;Salvador DaliandMagritte在绘画中；Marcel Duchamp在雕塑中；Man RayandJohn Heartfield在摄影和达利andLuis Bunuelin cinema. Much Avant Garde art attacks lucidity and clarity and deliberately pursues obscurity.

The traumatic experience of the First World War and of Europe’s collapse into barbarism provides the context of much Avant Garde art. A fissure was created between official discourse (the rhetoric of war, victory, diplomacy etc.) and the language of the creative artist. Language was considered redundant or deficient, a stifling convention in the way of our apprehension of reality. There was a new stress on finding a new/language –“trouver une langue” (Rimbaud)- 为现实的新型和更真实的愿景而言。对幼稚或刻板的语言，语言游戏，自动写作，胡说八道和句法诗歌和“报纸诗”的偏爱都是前卫戈德写作的特征。

There was a general loss of faith in absolutes: God, Man, Reason, Truth, Beauty, Honour, Authority etc. Reason, logic, language and accepted social values were all rejected. Avant Garde artists defined themselves in opposition to the dominant conservative and reactionary forces within society often seeing themselves as aesthetic terrorists antagonistic to accepted social ideals and values:Anti-elitism, anti-authoritarianism, gratuitousness, anarchy, aid nihilism are clearly implied in the Dadaist doctrine of “anti-art for anti-art’s sake” (the formula. ofTristan Tzara). The pervasive elements of negation however, went side by side with a Utopian impulse. There was an affinity with the radical political movements of the day such as Anarchism and Communism and in the case of the Italian Futurists, Fascism. Avant Garde artists saw themselves as the harbingers of new forms of social relationships to be built upon the ruins of the old order, and they indeed were the harbingers of Modernist literature.

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标签：阿尔弗雷德·贾里（Alfred Jarry）,Andre Breton,Avant Garde,前卫现代主义,Avant-Garde's Relation to Modernist Thought,电影,Dadaism,John Heartfield,Louis Aragon,Luis Bunuel,Man Ray,Marcel Duchamp,现代主义,Photography,Rene Magritte,Rimbaud,Salvador Dali,Surrealism,Tristan Tzara