The Shift of Consciousness in the Time of the Avant-garde
Tatjana Micić
ISBN: 978-80-908400-0-3
Publisher: Micić Tatjana
Edition: Scrolls of Symbolic Thinking. 1st Scroll
Cover: paperback
Pages: 123
Year of publishing: 2021
Dimensions: 16,5 x 24,5
Weight: 280 g
Language: English
Categories: avant-garde, art, literature, mythology
Price: 15EUR + shipping fee
The articles in front of you are a selection of the author's works published in the period from 2004 to 2009 while teaching at the Faculty of Arts in Prague at the Department of Slavic and Eastern European Studies of Charles University and writing a doctoral dissertation on Mythical Paradigms of the Avant-garde and its Era.
The articles are written in English, and I note with regret that I am not able to translate them into Czech and Serbian now, even though I would like them to be available to Serbian and Czech readers, because I live and create in different speaking environments. That is why in this edition I am enclosing an introduction in three languages in the hope that it will make it easier to read and better understand the articles for audiences from different backgrounds.
Avant-garde appeared as a result of a great crisis that affected the world and especially European culture at the beginning of the 20th century. In the book: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Edmund Husserl said that the crisis was reflected in a multitude of opposing scientific theories and philosophical systems. Therefore, the lack of a single scientific basis has created a relativism of scientific knowledge and socio-ethical values. Unlike Husserl, Losev believed that at that time there was a change in mythology and in the way of believing. In: The Dialectics of Myth, he wrote that every science is mythological and emphasized that the basic way of understanding social and scientific trends was through the sociology of mythology. Carl Gustav Jung later raised the question of the "spirit of the age", believing that if we wanted to study the religions, myths, and cultural currents of different countries and peoples of the world, we would have to examine the manifestation of every great archetype or every "spirit of the age".
The selection of the works was made in such a way as to show that avant-garde art and literature from the beginning of the 20th century did not create works, but rather manifested something. What did it manifest? It manifested a historical change in the consciousness of people living at the beginning of the twentieth century, which is now becoming increasingly apparent to people living in the first half of the twenty-first century.