The Place of a Literary Manifesto in the 21st Century

Abstract

The manifesto, both political and aesthetic, significantly marked the map of cultural history. The genre, steaming from approximately the beginning of the 19th century, has gone through a number of transformations in terms of form and content and reached its participative peak in the 1920s. Being established during the times of modernism, manifesto practice gradually decreased at the cusp of cultural epochs, thus resulting in being marginalized, parodied, and extruded from the present discourse. The article, narrowly focusing on the literary manifesto, suggests several reasons for the mentioned phenomena.Taking the two semantic aspects of a literary manifesto – performative and theoretic – the author explores their functioning in terms of the two representative movements of modernism and postmodernism. “The moment of the manifesto,” meaning the climax regarding the quantity of produced manifestos in times of modernist flourish, is explained by the collapse of a public sphere concept, the performativity of the epoch itself, and the prevalence of complex theoretical paradigms aiming at rethinking the literary canon. The postmodern fall concerning manifesto tradition is argued to be the result of the shift in theoretical approach and apparatus, associated with the linguistic turn in art and philosophy, while the performative aspect is claimed to be ruined due to such reasons as the acceleration of the literary process, inactiveness in terms of protest activity due to the post-capitalist reality, alienation from “the real” politics and the tendency to consider art more quality if being peripheralized.Therefore, the article elaborates on the need for manifesto practice in the 21st century as the manifesto is considered as the instrument of reconstructing and reviving the performative aspect, necessary for political emancipation. Also, noticing the present theoretic stagnation in literary studies, the author necessitates the resurgence of a manifesto as it may appear helpful in reinvigorating the field of literary theory.