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Comparative Literature Studies 37.4 (2000) 424-427



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Book Reviews

Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern


Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. By Janet Lyon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. x + 230 pp. $18.95.
We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

F. T. Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909

BLAST / years 1837 to 1900 / Curse abysmal inexcusable middle-class (also Aristocracy and Proletariat).

Wyndham Lewis, "Manifesto," Blast 1914

"Butch, femme and androgynous dykes, leather queers, drag kings and queens, transsexuals and trans-genders will not be thrown to the wolves so that straight-acting 'gay people' can beg for acceptance at our expense."

The Lesbian Avengers, Dyke Manifesto, 1993

From our vantage point at the end of the twentieth century, incendiary rhetoric like this looks familiar, a recognizable signifier both of aesthetic avant-gardism and of the calls to political and social action by groups whose disgust with their marginalization has reached the point of combustion. But for those of us who work in twentieth-century studies, in which the manifesto has come to be recognized as a key aesthetic and political genre, it is good to be reminded from time to time of the long history of this genre. Janet Lyon's engaging and sophisticated new book not only reminds us of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century emergence of the manifesto form, but also shows compellingly why that long history still matters. Discussing a wide array of English, French, and [End Page 424] American manifestoes--including those of the Diggers and the Levelers of 17th-century England, Olympe de Gouges's "Declaration of the Rights of Woman" (1791), the Communist Manifesto, the manifestoes of the twentieth-century aesthetic avant-garde, texts like Christabel Pankhurst's The Great Scourge and How to End It (1913), and more recent works like Monique Wittig's (and collaborators') "Combat pour la libération de la femme" (1970) and Donna Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1985)--Lyon presents a simultaneously formal and historical account, one that avoids the blinders of decontextualized formalism and the sometimes limited interpretations offered by narrowly-focused historical accounts of individual manifestoes. The iterability of the form, and the manifesto's rhetorical reliance upon our recognizing its special status, demand explanation as well; witness display artist Jenny Holzer's "Inflammatory Essays" (1979-82), pasted up around New York City, deployed the tropes and forms of manifestoes while cleverly avoiding any specific demands or markers of a particular group identity. Lyon provides a compelling interpretation of the genre, the implications of which will interest not only literary scholars but anyone researching the developing promises (and what Lyon characterizes as broken promises) of modernity.

Lyon's call for understanding manifestoes within intersecting historical contexts intends to complicate readings of them as transparent declarations of goals and demands. And this extra attention pays off: her readings of the social and cultural pressures that help explain the particular rhetorical strategies adopted by specific manifestoes are intriguing and complex. For instance, her reading of the three-way dialogues and relationships among the avant-garde manifestoes of the Italian Futurists, British Vorticists, and suffragette writers of pre-War London allows Lyon to "show how the rhetoric and tactics of the militant women's movement were enfolded into the foundations of English modernism, and how, conversely, the closely watched public activities of futurists and vorticists in England helped to produce the public identity of the militant suffrage movement" (94). Such an account avoids the reductive impulse to see one movement as merely an adversarial context for understanding the other, or, even worse, missing the relationship entirely.

Even readers familiar with Lyon's previous work will find this book's historical claims ambitious, as Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern draws together more than 300 years of manifesto strategies and contexts into a coherent picture. Lyon uses the manifesto's long history to interrogate Jürgen Habermas's theory of the bourgeois public sphere--a vision characterized by deliberative "disinterested" reason, venues of debate like the coffee...

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