tri decenije pisanja manifesta

Three Decades of Writing on Manifesto: The Making of a Genre

Galia YanoshevskyFrench, Bar-Ilan University

Abstract The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it aims to survey the abundant writings on manifesto. The study of existing definitions reflects the diffuse frontiers, even the confusion, among the political, the artistic, and the literary manifesto to a point where, besides attributing to it certain generic characteristics, it is difficult to speak of an evolution of the manifesto. Second, this article seeks to show the relationship between scholarly work on manifesto and the position of the researcher in the academic field. The researcher’s position in the field of literary criticism is determined by the subject matter of his or her research. Hence manifesto, though a subversive, marginal writing, helps him or her “move toward the center.” Marginal academic domains and peripheral research groups gain notice and centrality by advocating a new research program. Studies of manifestos played such a role for French Canadian literary scholars.

Why Manifestos Have Been Abundantly Studied

Over the past three decades, writing on manifesto has flourished in Europe and in North America—so much so that the question posed at the beginning of the 1980s, “Is manifesto a good semiotic object?” (Abastado 1980a: 3), seems obsolete today, since many scholars have studied its history and its general features without doubting its legitimacy as a genre of its own. Yet researchers have repeatedly complained about the neglect of manifestos

Poetics Today 30:2 (Summer 2009) DOI10.1215/03335372-2008-010© 2009 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

I thank Meir Sternberg for his thoughtful comments and editing, thanks to which this article gained clarity and perspective.

258 Poetics Today 30:2

in literary criticism. For example, in her 1991 article on feminist polemics and manifestos, Janet Lyon (1991: 101) wonders why the manifesto, a genre “that has played so decisive a role in the history of radical democracy and dissent has received little theoretical attention in this country [the United States].” In French-speaking circles, Lise Dumasy and Chantal Massol (2001: 11) protest in the introduction to a collection entitled Pamphlet, utopie, manifeste XIXe–XXe siècles that “the pamphlet and the manifesto seemed to us a bit forgotten, despite M. Angenot’s important contribution, on the one hand, and the recent works by W. Asholt and H. van den Berg, on the other” (my translation). Such claims are today clearly false in view of the large corpus of texts now classified as manifestos, extending from the political to the artistic and literary varieties. For instance, Laura Winkiel (2006: 66) speaks of “political declarations posted in the twelfth century, by European heads of state, religious leaders, and other public officials who used the manifesto to make religious proofs, academic axioms, and state decisions such as exe-cuting political prisoners, going to war, and passing decrees clearly under-stood to its literate public.” Wikipedia’s entry on manifestos provides a list of manifestos, starting with the Futurist Manifesto in 1909 and running to contemporary Internet ones. Dividing the last hundred years into five periods, it provides a wide range of manifestos, from “classical” prewar avant-garde manifestos (futurism, Dadaism, surrealism); through postwar manifestos, such as the 1948 Refus global;� counterculture manifestos, like Valerie Solanas’s (1967) controversial SCUM Manifesto;� Punk and Cyber manifestos, like “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century” by VNS Matrix (1991);� to manifestos published on the Web, like the Stuck-ists’ virtual manifestos, which have sprung up due to the wide use of the Internet.� Finally, manifestos seem to attract the attention of literary schol-

1. The Refus global (Total Refusal ) was an antiestablishment and antireligious manifesto released on August 9, 1948, in Montreal by a group of sixteen young Quebecois artists and intellectuals known as Les Automatistes, led by Paul-Emile Borduas. The Refus global was greatly influenced by André Breton, and it extolled the creative force of the subcon-scious (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_manifesto#White_Manifesto_1946). It was lately sold in an auction in August 2008 (www.radio-canada.ca/regions/Quebec/2008/08/04/003– exemplaire_refus_global.shtml).2. SCUM is an acronym for the Society for Cutting Up Men, and the manifesto was not specifically about art (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_manifesto#S.C.U.M._Manifesto_1967).3. VNS Matrix was a cyberfeminist art collective founded in Adelaide, Australia, in 1991. Their manifesto, written in 1991, was translated over the years into many languages (www .sysx.org/gashgirl/VNS/TEXT/PINKMANI.HTM).4. Stuckism is an art movement that was founded in 1999 in Britain by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art. The Stuck-ists formed an alternative to the Young British Artists (also known as Brit Art) patronized by Charles Saatchi. The group is defined by its Stuckists Manifesto. Written by Childish and

Yanoshevsky • Three Decades of Writing on Manifesto 259

ars, as is manifested by their significant presence in recent publications—both collections� and analytic works�—numerous dissertations,� and a few conferences.� Indeed, the scope of works on manifesto is wide and reflects different tendencies and perspectives. It ranges from anthologies and collections with little or no theoretical consideration, such as Mary Ann Caws’s (2001) anthology of literary manifestos or Benjamin Harshav’s (2001) anthology of modernist manifestos in Hebrew translation, to particular case studies. Thus quite a few dissertations and articles have been written on manifestos specific to particular artistic or literary movements (futurism, Dadaism, surrealism, symbolism, Romanticism, etc.). These are generally excluded from the present study, but examples are Anna Lawton’s “Futurist Mani-festoes as an Element of Performance” (1985) and her “Russian and Ital-ian Futurist Manifestoes” (1989). The research done on the topic also encompasses works with a theoretical contribution to the analysis of the manifesto, such as Marcel Burger’s Les manifestes: Paroles de combat (2002). Burger attempts to distinguish among political, literary, and avant-garde manifestos by studying them as variants of what he dubs “combative” discourse. Some researchers who theorize the manifesto advance theses that reflect their own perspectives but do not lay a claim to comprehensiveness. For example, Dumasy and Massol (2001: 11) state in the introduction to their collection, “Our intention was not to recapitulate the different theories and analyses concerning these discursive practices, but rather to gener-ate confrontations and interrogations on discursive and textual forms” (my

Thomson in 1999, it places great importance on the value of painting as a medium as well as the use of it for the communication and the expression of emotion and experience—as opposed to what they see as the superficial novelty, nihilism, and irony of conceptual art and postmodernism (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuckism#Manifestos).5. Asholt and Fähnders 1995; Caws 2001 (which is considered to be the first comprehensive collection of manifestos in English).6. Important recent works include Berg and Grüttemeier 1998; Lyon 1999; Dumasy and Massol 2001; Burger 2002; Somigli 2003; Puchner 2006. For a listing of the major publica-tions on manifestos, see the selected annotated bibliography following this article.7. I will only mention a few titles here: Amidon 2003; Burger 1996; Encke 2002; Heimpel 1996; Lefebvre 2003; Reddaway 2002; Somigli 1996. For further details, see the selected annotated bibliography following this article.8. For example, the special issue of Littérature on manifesto (1980) is the result of a con-ference organized by the center of textual semiotics in Paris X Nanterre in January 1980. “Towards a History of the Literary Institution in Canada 3” was organized by the Research Institute for Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta in 1987 and published in proceedings in 1990 (Blodgett and Purdy 1990). Still another conference, “Pamphlet, Utopia, and Manifesto,” was held at the University of Stendhal-Grenoble III in 2001 and published in proceedings in 2001 (Dumasy and Massol 2001).


translation). By contrast, other scholars try to draw general rules of mani-festo from the particular studies they conduct. For example, Lyon (1999: 1) associates feminist polemics with manifestos and attempts to draw from her case study (of tracts of the Diggers and Levellers of 1650 [cf. Haller and Davies 1964 (1944)] and the 1992 Dyke Manifesto) “a comprehensive analysis of the manifesto, a ubiquitous yet under-theorized genre in the catalogue of modern discursive forms.” One of her broadest claims is that “the manifesto form has much to teach us about the problems of moder-nity” (ibid.: 2). Like Lyon, Luca Somigli (2003) and Martin Puchner (2006) view the manifesto as a form that announces modernity. Somigli views the manifesto as a form of negotiation and legitimization of the artist’s role at a time of profound social and cultural transformation, that is, European modernism (1885–1915). He thus proceeds from politics to aesthetics, from the history of the political manifesto (1550–1850) to the avant-garde mani-festo, notably the futurist manifestos in France and in England. Finally, Puchner analyzes the prototypical Communist Manifesto and studies the way the manifesto rhetoric has infiltrated into modernist aesthetics—collages, plays, poems, and theatrical performances—or what he calls “manifesto art.” Those works are not based “on the doctrines and theories proclaimed in manifesto,” we hear, “but on the formal influence of the manifesto, its poetry, on art” and are “aggressive rather than introverted; screaming rather than reticent; collective rather than individual” (Puchner 2006: 6). Rather than focus on a specific movement or manifesto, I wish to study here the various attempts to define the genre by looking into the scholarly discourse on manifesto. My purpose is twofold. First, I want to show how manifesto has been forged into a literary genre by critics and scholars. Sec-ond, I want to trace the emergence of research on manifesto in academic discourse and to show how it influences the literary academic field. Alice Kaplan’s (1983) idea of the mimetic relationship between theory and its subject matter resonates in my claim that we can gain insight into aca-demic research by examining the evolution of manifesto studies.� By iden-tifying how manifesto has been (re)studied by critics and scholars, I will show how its strategic positioning at the crossroads of literary theory and academic scholarship can teach us something about the way genres are formed but also about how academics choose their subject matter. For this purpose, I will review during the analysis some of the work done on mani-festo for the past three decades.

9. “The effect of the pamphlets and manifestoes on theory is striking: they tend to ‘contami-nate’ theory, in a way which makes theory start seeing itself, too, as real, as event, with a history and ideological and social underpinnings of its own. Pamphlets and manifestoes tend to engender new pamphlets and manifestoes” (Kaplan 1983: 75).


Genre-ating the Manifesto

Today the existence of the manifesto qua genre is indisputable thanks to a series of studies conducted over the past three decades. One of its most comprehensive theoretical examinations is that of Hubert van den Berg in his 1998 “Manifesto, eine Gattung?” (“Manifesto, a Genre?”), with refer-ence to manifestos of the historical avant-garde (futurism, Dadaism, sur-realism). In the realm of literature, Djelal Kadir and Ursula K. Heise, editors of the volume on the twentieth century (F) of The Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004), devote the first chapter (pp. 21–55) to manifestos. Furthermore, another indication of the genre’s maturing stage is the fact that it encompasses, according to the majority of scholars, texts not nec-essarily labeled “manifesto” or viewed as such by their authors. This is typically illustrated by Joachim Du Bellay’s La défense et illustration de la langue française (1948 [1549]), which was considered “a sort of manifesto” by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve in the nineteenth century (Heimpel 1999: 252–57). According to Daniel Chouinard (1980) and Caws (2001), what are today regarded as the manifestos of Romanticism and symbolism constitute another example of texts which were never labeled as such at the time. Claude Abastado’s “Introduction à l’analyse des manifestes” (1980a) seems to have acquired the status of a founding text in the analysis of the genre. In fact, studies by Berg and Ralf Grüttemeier (1998) and Caws (2001) founded their definitions of manifesto on Abastado’s 1980 article. The reason for the centrality of Abastado’s article in the approach to both political and literary manifestos doubtless lies not only in its early date of publication but also in its modularity. The principal characteristic assigned to the manifesto by Abastado is its “multiformity,” its versatility: that it can come in different shapes and forms. This characteristic may account for the numerous typologies that can be found in the work on manifesto, grouping families of polemical discourse. It also seems to be responsible for the confusion between political declarations and their literary counter-parts, which runs through the work on manifestos: if the manifesto can assume all shapes and forms, then it can be political or literary as well. Indeed, Abastado (1980a: 3) subsumes a variety of types of text under manifesto: “The term manifesto, strictly speaking, applies to (often short) texts published in a brochure, in a journal or a review, in the name of a political, philosophical, literary or artistic movement” (my translation). It is defined by him vis-à-vis the call to action (l’appel ), the declaration, the petition, and the preface. For instance, the call to action, according to Aba-stado, invites action without proposing a program, as did, for example, the


“Appeal of 18 June 1940” (ibid.).�0 The declaration affirms positions without seeking the readers’ active response (for instance, the “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie,” published in 1960) (ibid.).�� The petition, according to Abastado (ibid.), is a specific demand signed by those who make it; the preface accompanies a text, which it introduces, comments on, and justifies. Abastado claims that the forms of manifestos he suggests are historically determined: although a few examples can be found starting from the end of the eighteenth century, the phenomenon mainly belongs to the second half of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century. Abastado also emphasizes the fuzzy borderlines among various types of texts: manifesto, proclamation, appeal to action, address, preface, and dec-laration. The historical circumstances of the text and its reception (under-standing, reading, judgment) entail a shift in markers.�� But they can all be considered, according to him, as belonging to the family of manifestary texts. These ideas are taken up by a number of scholars, notably Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fähnders (1995) and Berg (1998). Actually, in the Ger-man arena scholars have even combined two perspectives in the study of manifesto: the manifesto qua genre from a discursive (synchronic or sys-tematic) perspective and the manifesto as a genre from a historical point of view. Berg (ibid.: 194) thus asks, while considering the historical avant-garde, whether the manifesto counts as a genre of its own. Though part of a larger family of polemical genres, such as declarations, political decrees issued by rulers, pamphlets, and so forth, the manifesto can be distin-guished by its affinity to the historical avant-garde.�� That avant-garde came to be realized through texts titled or functioning as manifesto. Fol-lowing Abastado, Berg (1998) accordingly studies manifesto texts that do not bear the name in their titles or never mention it in the body of the texts and sometimes even appear under a different name. This greatly enlarges the category. His classification includes, apart from the declaration, the

10. This was a famous speech by Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French Forces, in 1940. From it arose the French Resistance to the German occupation during World War II.11. Better known as the “Manifeste des 121,” this text affirms the right of the French to object to the war in Algeria, to support the Algerians and their cause, without actually calling to action.12. As an example, he gives André Breton’s preface to Poisson soluble (1924). Initially designed as a preface to a collection of poems, it was published separately and came to be known as surrealism’s first manifesto. Another example is the “Déclaration sur l’insoumission,” which became the above mentioned “Manifeste des 121” (Abastado 1980a: 4).13. By “historical” I mean the avant-garde movements of the beginning of the twentieth century: futurism, Dadaism, and surrealism.


decree, the proclamation, and the petition, the appeal to action, the ulti-matum, flyers, pamphlets, explanations, prefaces, open letters, answers, and so on (ibid.: 193–94). On the other hand, Berg shows the difficulty of distinguishing the mani-festo from related discourses. He maintains that anthologies of the avant-garde that claim to be devoted to the manifesto seem to bring in other genres as well (ibid.: 194). No study, he argues, singles out the manifesto and tries to give it an orderly definition or meaning. He thus comes to the conclusion, along with Abastado and Asholt and Fähnders, that the mani-festo is an extremely plural and open form (ibid.: 199), one that always co-occurs with other kinds of text: manifesto and document; manifesto and proclamation; manifesto, proclamation, and document; program and manifesto; theoretical writing and manifesto; essay, manifesto, and theo-retical writing; and so forth (Asholt and Fähnders 1995: 455–59; quoted in Berg 1998: 194). The manifesto, then, relates to a variety of families: political writing, polemical discourse, or theoretical writing (literature d’idées). But it seems to be most closely akin to programmatic texts in times of crisis or change. Indeed, the second part of Abastado’s definition pertains to these generic characteristics of the manifesto: “manifesto” is any text that takes a vio-lent position and produces a flagrant commanding relationship (une relation injunctive flagrante) between its producer and his or her audience (Abastado 1980a: 4). These characteristics are taken up by other scholars who see the mani-festo as belonging to the family of polemical discourse and emphasize its violent nature. From the first systematic studies of the manifesto (as in Lit-térature and Etudes françaises in the 1980s), then, it is believed (sometimes argued, sometimes just assumed) that manifestos evolve from a family of rupture and crisis and from a family of polemical and critical discourse. As Jeanne Demers (1980: 6) puts it, the manifesto’s “explicit function is precisely to question the system,” and “crisis” is its “raison d’être” (my translation). Earlier, the manifesto was mentioned in a special issue on pamphletary discourse. There Marc Angenot (1978: 255) studies the discursive aspects of the pamphlet by looking into a corpus of polemical, pamphletary texts and satires published in France and in French-speaking countries in the modern period. Though he does not specifically study the manifesto there, he includes it in the family of “polemical discourses” (discours polémiques) and offers other subdivisions, such as polemic, satire, and literary essay. However, in his 1982 book on pamphletary discourse (La parole pamphlé-


taire), he devotes a separate subchapter to the manifesto (Angenot 1982: 60–61). There the manifesto is considered as a variant of polemical dis-course, since it asserts and defends a thesis and invites the reader to take a stance. It is also short, as required by the wider discourse type, and shares the same characteristics of calling the reader to active participation: taking a stance, accepting a thesis, or voicing one’s agreement. This type of dis-course bears a performative aspect, which represents both a risk and an obligation for those who sign it. All this makes the manifesto a functional discourse close to the pamphlet, the polemic, and the satire. Dumasy and Massol (2001: 12) group the manifesto with the pamphlet and the utopia, all of which they consider to be hybrid literary forms that break the limits of genre and bear witness to a literature of, or in, crisis. What these types of discourse have in common is the feature that they are all textual strategies expressing social and political changes and mutations. All three seem to be forms of post–French Revolution modernity. Manifestos are therefore akin to programmatic and prescriptive dis-course. They may appear in the form of prefaces and art poétique (Gleize 1980).�� In these forms, they often function as an introduction to an ensemble of works (existing or potential) or to a new idea they wish to advance or justify. Thus the preface by Crébillon’s fils to his novel Egarements du coeur et de l’esprit (1736–38), Denis Diderot’s piece of literary criticism entitled Eloge de Richardson (1761), and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1784 review of Fanny Burney’s Cecilia are given as examples of manifestos of the eighteenth-century novel because of their innovative contents (Lynch 1980). To some scholars, literary manifesto communicates the principles or doctrine of an aesthetic or literary movement to a more or less wide public (Schultz 1981: 36, 228; quoted in Berg 1998: 198). Others, like E. D. Blodgett and A. G. Purdy (1990: ix), see “the function of the preface and the manifesto as texts designed to situate another text or writing practice within the literary insti-tution.” They thus study prefaces and literary essays as manifestos, operat-ing to contextualize a new discourse practice within or vis-à-vis the poetic system. Lastly, the manifesto may be viewed as a programmatic discourse of power because it aspires to change reality with words; the manifesto is a discourse where knowledge is asserted rather than developed because used by the person who utters it as a revolutionary tool representing his or her dis-

14. Demers (1980) attempts to distinguish manifesto from ars poetica. Like other types of criti-cal discourse, the manifesto’s function is to question the literary system, while ars poetica goes with the system and explains it (ibid.: 6). But the manifesto still needs the system and relies upon it and is therefore quickly recuperated by it.


covery of knowledge: “The author of a manifesto sees himself first and foremost as a researcher, an inventor, a discoverer. The evolutionary con-ception of knowledge that characterizes the prefaces gives place to a . . . revolutionary conception. . . . It is about . . . imposing the future by pro-voking revolutions. . . . The conception of knowledge that is at stake is that of foundational, even epiphanic knowledge” (Millot 1996: 212–13; my translation).

Fuzziness: From Form to Function

As I mentioned earlier, to be a manifesto a text need not be dubbed as such as long as it looks and behaves like one. For instance, both Marjorie Perloff (1984) and Lawton (1985) agree that Filippo Tommaso Marinetti considered the manifesto to be a new literary genre with a definite structure and style (Lawton 1985: 475). According to Perloff (1984: 65), Marinetti even advised the painter Gino Severini to rephrase his manuscript, which was intended to be a manifesto (Peinture de la lumière, de la profondeur, du dyna-misme; ibid.: 93n1), so as to give it the allure of a manifesto.�� Indeed, researchers sometimes prefer to bypass the designation “mani-festo” and consider writings that are “manifestantische” (manifestary) or “proklamatorischen” (hortatory) (Berg 1998: 197). This follows Abastado’s (1980a: 3) observation on the unfathomable (“insaisissable,” ungraspable) nature of the manifesto and his preference for his coinage “écriture mani-festaire” (manifestary writing; see Berg 1998: 204) or “texts with a mani-festo function” (“textes ayant une fonction de manifeste”) over the fixed label “manifesto.” In this sense, research on prefaces as manifestos (e.g., Blodgett and Purdy 1990; Millot 1996; Dumasy and Massol 2001) or art-works (Puchner 2006) and novels as manifestos (Lynch 1980; Winkiel 1999) can be characterized as bearing on the manifestary rather than on the manifesto proper. This considerably multiplies the number of corpora and case studies available to researchers: they are no longer limited by a specific appella-tion or by a particular type of discourse, because texts with manifestary qualities are found in literary, aesthetic, political, and perhaps other writ-ing. Many critics thus turn to defining the manifesto’s functions rather than

15. “I therefore advise you to take it back and reword it, removing all that I have already mentioned, and intensifying and tightening it, recasting the whole new part in the form of Manifesto and not in that of the review-article about futurist painting.” (The letter is repro-duced in Archivi del futurismo, ed. Maria Drudi Gambillo and Teresa Fiori, vol. 1, 294–95 [Rome: De Luca, 1958]; and quoted in Perloff 1984: 65.)


trying to demarcate it by reference to a certain typology of texts (Berg 1998: 202). Instead of figuring out whether a manifesto belongs to liter-ary or poetic discourse or not, scholars identify the roles ascribed to the manifesto by the writers themselves. Scholars like Demers and Line Mc Murray (1986: 103–13) have therefore attempted to divide the manifesto into subcategories, such as imposition or opposition, central or peripheral, “everydayism,” and so forth. Whether concerning the literary or the political kind, the force and the theatricality of the manifesto are singled out by all researchers. Manifestos are violent acts, spectacular acts, a way to sound your voice, whether the act is artistic (like blaspheming) or political (like kidnapping a plane or a person or suicide, though Abastado [1980a: 5] mentions specifically that these will not be retained in the definition of the manifesto). The only uniform convention among manifestos, maintains Lyon (1999: 13), is a par-ticular hortatory rhetorical style. Puchner (2002: 449) sees a clear con-nection between theater and manifesto: both involve the act of making visible. The manifesto has a particular performativity: it does not “merely describe a history of rupture, but produces such a history, seeking to create this rupture actively through its own intervention” (ibid.: 450). The con-nection between theatricality and manifesto, claims Puchner (ibid.: 461), holds especially for historical avant-garde manifestos, in particular in the early phase of futurism and Dadaism, when manifestos were performed, screamed even, in front of an audience. This kind of theatricality is operative, claims Puchner, even in the most classical and most political specimen, the Communist Manifesto. It turns into a kind of dramatic dialogue halfway through, when Marx begins to engage other thinkers and does so by giving voice, in the form of direct speech, to their arguments before switching back to his own voice in responding to these hypothetical objections. The drama of history is thus mirrored in the dialogic structure of the Communist Manifesto, and dialectics rejoins its origin in the dramatic dialogues of Plato (ibid.: 462). So far, we have followed the development of manifesto study from a generic perspective. We now move to a survey of the development of the definition of manifesto, which shows the impossibility of reconstructing an evolution of the genre. In the following sections, I will try to show how the literary manifesto became entangled in the definition of its political and artistic counterparts. I will start by indicating the political origins of the artistic and the literary manifestos. I will then show how the literary mani-festo has been received by literary criticism.


On the Political Origins of the Artistic and Literary Manifestos and the Fuzzy Frontiers between Them

Scholars tend to derive political, artistic, and literary manifestos from common roots. The fuzzy borders among these kinds are already visible in the first two special issues on the manifesto from the 1980s. The Canadian Etudes françaises (1980) opts for the hybrid title “Le manifeste poétique/poli-tique,” while its French counterpart, Littérature (1980), carries a seemingly neutral title—“Les manifestes”—but likewise brings together articles on artistic and political manifestos. The latter collection includes an analy-sis of the 1918 Dada Manifesto (Abastado 1980b); articles on musical, cinematographic, and pictorial manifestos (respectively, Escal 1980 and Vanoye 1980; Bauret 1980; Mourier 1980); a study of the manifesto of the “littérature engagée” (Idt 1980); and a theoretical article on the political manifesto (Meyer 1980). Abastado’s (1980a) opening article in Littérature introduces the history of the analysis of manifesto (political or poetic) through an account of the political manifesto’s history. The collocation of the three types of manifestos—political, artistic, and literary—is also per-ceptible in the attempts to define the manifesto’s characteristics and forms. Abastado invokes the mythical figure of Proteus to describe the mani-festo’s multiformity: there is no clear agreement on which forms can and should be included in the generic family of manifestos, and this sometimes amounts to contradictions in subsequent scholarly work, as was shown in the previous section. For Caws (2001) and Puchner (2006), the manifesto became a genre with stable characteristics, starting from the Communist Manifesto (1848) by Marx and Friedrich Engels, of “immense influence and historical importance for later aesthetic proclamations and political statements” (Caws 2001: xix). In particular, argues Puchner, it became a reference point for Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto, where it was adopted and adapted to suit artis-tic purposes. Ever since Marinetti’s manifesto, the term has been used, as Chouinard (1980: 28) puts it, in retrospective assimilation—Manifesto of Symbolism, Manifesto of Romanticism. For Jean-Nicolas Illouz (2005: 112), Marinetti’s manifesto actually represents a sequel to a tradition of publishing declarative texts in the press, much like Jean Moréas’s essay on symbolism in Le figaro, dating from September 18, 1886, which later came to be known as symbolism’s manifesto. Most accounts of the genre, then, consider the political origins of the aesthetic/poetic manifesto. In examining the futurist one, Perloff (1984: 66) refers to the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of political manifesto: “MANIFESTO: (1647) A public declaration or proclamation, usually issued


with the sanction of a sovereign prince or state, or by an individual or body of individuals whose proceedings are of public importance, for the purpose of making known past actions and explaining the reasons or motives for actions as forthcoming” (my emphasis). In Burger’s (2002: 119–21) account, everything starts with the political manifesto, initially a “particular mode of management for the ruler,” and later, with the emergence of civil society in France (la société d’Etat), “manifestos” and other manifestary texts become essential elements of the public sphere, redefined by the new idea of citizenship. The political manifestos affirm citizenship and identity. For instance, the 1789 Declaration of French Independence represents an affir-mation of the public sphere and the citizen, and that is precisely why it is viewed as a manifesto (ibid.: 122–23). Manifesto becomes, according to Lyon (1999: 4), the emblem of political strife: “To write a manifesto is to participate symbolically in a history of struggle against dominant forces; it is to link one’s voice to the countless voices of previous revolutionary conflicts.” It seems that Lyon and Burger follow Alain Meyer’s (1980: 29–30) perception of the manifesto as political in the widest sense of the term, because it constitutes an intervention in the public sphere by a coherent group aspiring to “act upon the social fabric” by “destroying a previous order in order to glorify other institutions connected by new cement” (my translation). It signifies “a whole range of political speech acts” directed against the hegemony and the dominant culture (Lyon 1991: 102–3). For Burger (2002: 123) in turn, as already shown, manifestos and their effects cannot be dissociated from the public sphere. Despite the generally inclusive primary definition of manifesto, how-ever, all authors refrain from establishing a total synonymy between “manifesto” and “political manifesto.” Meyer, who perceives the political manifesto as the earliest subcategory of the genre, nevertheless doubts the assumption that this is the model for all other kinds of manifesto and offers distinctive characteristics of the political manifesto. It is, according to him, action oriented and time bound—with deadlines for carrying out the political actions required—as opposed to the aesthetic manifesto, which is value oriented and can transcend time (Meyer 1980: 31).�� Following Meyer, Lyon (1991: 123) suggests that the political manifesto is “pragmatic and tied to circumstance, as opposed to a utopian manifesto that envisions immediate and total transformation or an artistic manifesto that articu-lates and affirms a limited number of values or principles.” Caws (2001: xix) too seems to waver between viewing political and aesthetic manifestos

16. He bases this opposition on Lefebvre 1980: 55 and Merleau-Ponty 1947: xxviii.


as belonging to a single kind with common origins and common models or as two different types of discourse. But unlike Meyer, she views the artistic manifesto as grounded in a certain context: “The actual efficacy of the political or theological manifesto depends on its power of declamation and persuasion. That of the artistic manifesto, whose work will be carried on in another world altogether . . . , depends on its context as well as its clever-ness, and on the talents of its producer” (ibid.). Burger (2002: 90, 202–3) attempts to draw differences among the three types of manifesto. Thus, he claims, political manifestos (for example, Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto) are anchored in the public sphere and related to citizenship; literary manifestos (for instance, that of sym-bolism, 1886) also relate to the public sphere, but their operation differs considerably from that of political texts, since they are anchored in a fic-tional, aesthetic world made up of discourse, that is, literary texts (ibid.: 150). Finally, he reserves a separate category for avant-garde manifestos (e.g., André Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism [Breton 1963]), since they represent total refusal and the negation of a world external to the text as opposed to the literary manifesto, which assumes the existence of a literary sphere outside the text (Burger 2002: 181–82). Burger’s tripartite definition seems to aim at setting the avant-garde manifesto apart from both the political and the literary varieties, which to him share the same public origins and objectives. He finds the main difference between politi-cal and literary manifestos, on the one hand, and avant-garde manifestos, on the other, in their intentionality: the latter’s special characteristic is its subversiveness, while the other two constitute part of an existing public sphere that they support (ibid.: 13). Against Burger’s division, however, one can certainly think of literary manifestos (for example, those of the New Novel) that are subversive in the sense that they undermine the rules of novel writing. Scholars also differ on the role played by politics in manifestos. Whereas Burger (ibid.: 202–3) makes the strange claim that avant-garde manifestos escape the dichotomy between art and other (social) actions because they have aesthetic concerns but pretend to have political ones, for Somigli (2003) manifestos are places where political changes and events are incor-porated and defined. They play “a role in defining the relationship between the field of cultural production and other competing fields such as that of political power, and can simultaneously articulate a series of positions within the field itself ” (ibid.: 53). Politics is therefore not an excuse for the artistic manifesto but rather an integral part of it, since manifestos play a double role, both outside what he dubs the “creative domain” and other fields of power (i.e., the press) and “within the field of artistic production,


to articulate the identity of the various groups of individuals” (ibid: 54–55). For Somigli, the manifesto is only a small part of a process where literature becomes an independent field in bourgeois society: it defends verbally the cultural independence that art seeks within society. The artistic manifesto is sometimes perceived by researchers as the aes-theticizing of political aspirations. For example, Perloff (1984: 66) depicts how, in the autumn of 1913, at the height of the manifesto fever that swept across Europe in the years preceding World War I, the painter Severini, a leading member of the futurist movement, then living in Paris, sent the manuscript of a projected manifesto to futurism’s main founder, Marinetti, in Milan. In his reply, Marinetti commented on Severini’s manifesto, as we have already seen, and explained to him how to improve it. When study-ing Marinetti’s reply to Severini, Perloff (ibid.) thus considers Marinetti’s act as “creating a new genre, a genre that might meet the needs of mass audience. . . . The Futurist manifesto was a way of aestheticizing what had traditionally been a vehicle for political statement.” Similarly, manifestos related to the historical avant-garde (i.e., futurism, Dadaism, and surreal-ism, all avant-garde groups between 1910 and 1930) are, according to Lyon (1999), political declarations that have undergone an aesthetization: the avant-garde manifesto is where the shift toward aesthetics is carried out. The manifesto is thus viewed as a mixed, “vague” form, combining the artistic and the political: “The term’s vagueness extends even to the group of texts explic-itly bearing the title ‘manifesto,’ which by itself does not distinguish among uses of the form that are utopian, political, or artistic” (ibid.: 12). Lyon (1991) illustrates the aesthetization of the political in her analysis of feminist manifestos. She explains the gender rift by appealing to different relation-ships between the political and the aesthetic within manifestos written by women as opposed to men. Taking as an example the display artist Jenny Holzer’s manifestos entitled Inflammatory Essays (1979–82; see Waldman 1989), she shows where the difference between female avant-garde artists and their male forebears lies: while artists like Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis�� aestheticize political ideology, Holzer, on the contrary, inscribes and highlights the aesthetic within the political (Lyon 1991: 120–21). Like its artistic counterpart, the literary manifesto is viewed by critics as related to and influenced by the political. Thus, although an attempt was made to distinguish it as a genre of its own as early as 1974,�� the literary manifesto is nearly always studied in relation to the political. As I have

17. Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) was a Canadian-born British painter and author. He was a cofounder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited the Vorticists’ journal BLAST (two issues, 1914–15).18. In Vincent Fournier’s article “Manifestes littéraires” (1974).


previously mentioned, Etudes françaises’s special issue on manifesto is spe-cifically entitled “Le manifeste poétique/politique,” and the literary mani-festo’s lineage is traced back to the political declaration (Chouinard 1980). The kinship between the literary and the political is further emphasized in Dumasy and Massol’s (2001) collection of articles devoted to the study of pamphlet, utopia, and manifesto in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-turies. The authors view them as forms of literary expression, a “literature of ideas,” that is part of the field of literature (ibid.: 10). They examine how the postrevolutionary democratic context of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries materializes in these texts, whether literary or political (ibid.: 10–11). For Ronald Vroon (1995: 163), the literary manifesto, like the aes-thetic one, is used to introduce political ideas into literature. Illouz (2005: 93) too maintains that the manifestos of symbolism seem to translate into the literary field forms of combat and legitimacy belonging to the political field: this at a time when the French Republic becomes solid in 1870 but not yet without tensions, as it is still afflicted by a series of anarchist attacks throughout the 1890s. The rhetoric of the symbolist manifestos thus reflects the political conditions of their time. According to Burger (2002: 150), the conditions of emergence of the literary and the political manifestos are the same: they both attest to a major political crisis, though literary manifestos are turned toward aesthetics. As a literary phenomenon and as a further proof of being “an unfixed semantic field” (Berg 1998: 195), the manifesto’s boundaries are stretched beyond recognition. “Manifesto” is thus applied by critics to numerous texts that were not explicitly designated as such by their authors, such as literary/theoretical essays, introductions and literary declarations, prefaces to literary works, and lately even artistic catalogs. Thus Jean-Paul Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1947) is considered alternatively in Vincent Four-nier’s La grande encyclopédie Larousse article on “Manifestes littéraires” (1974) as a literary essay and a manifesto. The French authors Jules and Edmond de Goncourt (1980 [1888]) assembled introductions and prefaces to novels, dramas, and histories and published them in a collection that they titled Préfaces et manifestes littéraires. A century later, when referring to Romantic manifestos, Clarence Edward McClanahan (1981) and Larry H. Peer (1988) also include prefaces among manifestos. Caws (2001: xxv) is seemingly more prudent in stating that “generally the manifesto stands alone, does not need to lean on anything else, demands no other text than itself. . . . it is not, generally, a prefatory pre-appendage to something else.” Yet she immediately concedes the point by acknowledging that some prefaces, like William Wordsworth’s to the Lyrical Ballads or Victor Hugo’s La préface de Cromwell, had the effect of manifestos and their certainty of tone. McCla-


nahan (1981: iv, 45), dealing with Romantic literature, goes so far as to include magazines, journals, and newspapers in what he views as mani-festos: they provide “an abundance of writings on the subject of Romantic literature, aesthetics, and doctrine” (ibid.: 45). He even regards the letter as a form of manifesto. For example, in his 1823 Lettre à M. Chauvet, Ales-sandro Manzoni�� argues for the liberation of genius from the fetters of literary conventions and defines the new movement as a classicism broad-ened by history (ibid.: 91). Similarly, the Grand encyclopédie Larousse (Fournier 1974) gives as examples of manifesto Charles Perrault’s 1688–1697 Parallèles, Wordsworth’s preface to his Lyrical Ballads (1798), and Hugo’s La préface de Cromwell (1827). Bonner Mitchell (1966) includes a wide array of literary declarations among the literary manifestos of the Belle Epoque (1886–1914), such as Jean Schlum-berger’s Credo (Considérations), which reveals the intentions of the founders of the Nouvelle revue française. Prefaces to literary works are central to Blodgett and Purdy’s (1990) study of Canada’s literary institution. Caws’s Manifesto: A Century of Isms (2001) features a wide anthological horizon by including a host of literary genres—prefaces, poems, literary declarations, and literary essays. Some poems, like Stéphane Mallarmé’s “A Throw of a Dice,” are incorporated because of their revolutionary form. Finally, even catalogs are proving worthy of being treated as manifestos. In Colette Leinman’s (2009) study of surrealist exhibition catalogs from 1924 to 1938, they are considered as such, for besides introducing surrealist art, they also partici-pate in the shaping of surrealist ideology and group identity.

The Literary Manifesto and Its Frames of Reception; or, How a Literary Text Becomes a Manifesto

Literary critics play an important role in determining what text will be classified as manifesto. This critical involvement in determining the genre’s frontiers dates back to the nineteenth century, when, in his Tableau histo-rique et critique de la poésie française et du théâtre français au XVIe siècle (1843 [1828]), Sainte-Beuve considers Du Bellay’s La défense et illustration de la langue française (1948 [1549]) as the manifesto of this sudden insurrection of

19. Italian novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and critic. His tragedies also demonstrate in practice Manzoni’s disregard for the Aristotelian unities of time and place, which he stated formally in his Lettre à M. Chauvet: Sur l’unité de temps et de lieu dans la tragédie (A Letter on Dra-matic Unities and the Essence of Tragedy; 1823). Like the Lettre à M. Chauvet, many of Manzoni’s significant critical statements were drafted in epistolary form. Among these, his Lettera sul romanticismo (1823), written to the Marchese Cesare D’Azeglio, rejects the subject matter of classical mythology in modern literature.


a new generation (the Pléiade poets), trying to break away from the classi-cal means and themes of writing.�0 (Sainte-Beuve is mentioned in Fournier 1974 and quoted in Heimpel 1999: 255.) Referring to Sainte-Beuve’s text, Rod S. Heimpel (1999: 258–59) explains that “one owes this development to critical discourse, and not, or not exclusively, at any rate, to the myth of the author driven by his passion for ‘new ways of perceiving in literature and the arts’ [Littré]” (my translation). The manifestary identity of each and every one of the texts that Sainte-Beuve uses for illustration depends to a great extent “on their later reception and not on their instantaneous irrup-tion, unexpected and so to speak heroic, into the literary scene” (ibid.). Indeed, academic and journalistic criticism plays a prominent role in establishing a manifesto as such. Both the Symbolist Manifesto (Septem-ber 18, 1886) and the Futurist Manifesto (February 20, 1909) were con-ceived in the pages of Le figaro. Moréas’s Symbolist Manifesto was solicited by Le figaro’s editors, who published the article with the following note: “M. Jean Moréas, one of the best known literary revolutionaries, has for-mulated upon our request the fundamental principles of the new manifes-tation of art, for the benefit of the Supplement’s readers” (quoted in Illouz 2005: 100). What gives Moréas’s text the status of a manifesto, Illouz adds, is actually the journalistic choice of Le figaro’s editors and a media strategy on the part of Moréas. From then on, claims Illouz, literature has tried to gain legitimacy through the press. This is also the case with Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1947); published in Les temps modernes between February and July 1947, this text came to be viewed as a real manifesto of “littérature engagée.”�� The French New Novel’s manifestos repeat this pattern established in the earliest modern artistic/literary precedents. Nathalie Sarraute’s col-lection of essays L’ere du soupçon (1956) and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Pour un nouveau roman (1963) would not have been considered manifestos had it not been for their critical receptions. Though Sarraute’s theoretical texts were initially accepted as literary essays on current problems in literature (Picon 1956), their revolutionary and polemical tone, bespeaking the advent of a

20. According to Sainte-Beuve (1843 [1828]: 342–43), La défense, written in 1549, was ini-tially designed as a letter (épître) or a notice (averstissement) for the reader. But it gained vol-ume and became a booklet, where Du Bellay makes the revolutionary claim that poetry cannot rely solely on what comes easily and naturally but is the result of hard labor and pain. Du Bellay is also the first to give an example of an elevated and eloquent criticism. It is probably the readers’ reactions and the polemic that ensued with other poets from the old school that gave Sainte-Beuve (ibid.: 343) the idea to call it “a manifesto” (“Son manifeste fit grand éclat et scandale”).21. La grande encyclopédie Larousse of 1974 cites it as an example of the literary manifesto (Fournier 1974).


new literary school, did not escape the critics’ ears (Mauriac 1958). In later years it was taken to be, along with her successor’s collection, one of the two manifestos of the New Novel (Yanoshevsky 2006: 27–33). Robbe-Grillet’s Pour un nouveau roman features both literary journal articles and later versions of two series of columns on the situation of the novel published by him upon request in L’express and France observateur between 1955 and 1957 (Yanoshevsky 2003). Pour un nouveau roman is thus considered by critics as “140 pages of theoretical point of views on the esthetic of the genre of the novel,” as “a series of articles containing the famous 1956 manifesto (‘Une voie pour le roman futur’)” and “the notorious proclama-tion ‘Nature, humanisme, tragédie’” (Fletcher 1964: 854), or as reflections of a novelist on his art. Some critics (for example, Champigny 1967) men-tion the collection’s doctrinal nature and its revolutionary theories. The new edition of Sarraute’s L’ere du soupçon (1964) appeared almost simultaneously with the publication of Robbe-Grillet’s Pour un nouveau roman. This encouraged numerous comparisons between the two collec-tions and brought to the fore the polemical nature of Sarraute’s articles, considered as both apologia (Turnell 1964) and treatise (Tadié 1984). An article in the Tribune de Genève (1964) suggests that, although Sarraute’s theoretical articles have been published separately since 1947, the collec-tion “entirely preserves its polemical value” (my translation). In retrospect, the prominent literary editor Maurice Nadeau (1984) referred to Sar-raute’s collection as a central manifesto of the New Novel, a treatise on the novel that contributes to changing the view of literary history. The evi-dent polemical tone of Robbe-Grillet’s articles invited their classification as manifestos, though they themselves did not officially adopt this label. In short, even though the term manifesto is not always present in the critics’ or in the writers’ own discourse in reference to L’ere du soupçon and Pour un nouveau roman, those works often use a rich vocabulary that sig-nals this type of discourse: to plead, to oppose, to protest, to announce, to denounce, to witness, to attack, to declare, to contrast, to clarify, revo-lution, dogmatically, anti, “rejecting tradition,” and so forth. This usage supplies the proof that, even if not referred to directly as manifestos, the texts at issue are considered to have manifestary qualities that are clearly recognized and emphasized by the critics. In the following section, I attempt to show that the relationship between critics and manifestos is not unidirectional. As the critics determine what text will come to be taken as a manifesto, manifestos affect what critics write and how they position themselves in the literary field.


Research and Manifestos

An Abridged Sociopoetics of the Academic FieldIt would be a mistake to postulate a one-way relationship between mani-festo and criticism. True, criticism shapes its object—many a manifesto would not have been considered as such had it not been for the critics. But according to Kaplan (1983), the relationship between criticism and manifestos is reciprocal. Not only does criticism “enlarge the notion of mani-festoes to include such non-texts as Rimbaud’s silence, Lacan, and punk” (ibid.: 77), but as objects of study manifestos and pamphlets also affect the theories about them. In fact, she says: “The effect of the pamphlets and manifestoes on theory is striking: they tend to ‘contaminate’ theory, in a way which makes theory start seeing itself, too, as real, as event, with a history and ideological and social underpinnings of its own. Pamphlets and manifestoes tend to engender new pamphlets and manifestoes” (ibid.: 75). What’s more, Kaplan (ibid.: 76) hypothesizes that the object of study’s “energy” is transferred to criticism: the manifestos and pamphlets of liter-ary modernism studied in the 1960s through the 1980s gave rise to a new generation of critics, marked by the desire for new beginnings. The influence of manifestos on their students can be mimetic. If the manifesto is repetitive (Leroy 1980), then research on the manifesto is repetitive too, because it reiterates what has been done before: from the first important special issues on the topic in the 1980s until today, theories of manifesto, as well as particular case studies, constantly recap the mani-festo’s history and its poetics. The effect manifestos have on their criticism is even extended to the way researchers organize the knowledge they extract from the manifestos. For instance, Mc Murray’s (1980) article on Oulipo’s manifestos mimics the style and logic of Oulipo in the presentation of its critique, even from a graphic point of view. So much so that the reader wonders whether she or he is reading the criticism of the manifesto or the manifesto itself. For example, the article contains a “to do” list and a com-bination of graphics (icons) and text, much like the style devised by one of Oulipo’s prominent members, Georges Perec.�� Therefore, some of its parts do not at all look like an article published in a scientific journal (which, of course, it is). The same applies to Demers and Mc Murray’s 1986 L’enjeu du manifeste, le manifeste en jeu. While the book is devoted to the analysis of the genre, its hortatory style suggests that this may be yet another manifesto. Indeed, the declarative and revolutionary tone and style of manifestos, especially avant-garde ones, which breaks with literary and essayistic con-

22. See, for example, his La vie, mode d’emploi (1978).


ventions not only in content but also in form,�� perhaps demands that the critic break with a standard, logical reading in studying the manifestos. Criticism, claims Kaplan, needs to invent a new language for the analysis of manifestos/pamphlets.�� Leinman’s (2009) analysis of surrealist catalogs too is affected by her object of research. Just as the surrealist catalog’s lan-guage strives to break with its conventional applications (a catalog presents a work of art, transposes the visual into the verbal medium, etc.), so Lein-man’s attempt to classify the argument schema�� within the surrealist cata-logs eludes traditional discursive categorization: instead of subgrouping catalogs according to their recurrent argument schema, she demonstrates how each catalog functions as a manifesto in a unique way. The influence between manifestos and criticism is, then, reciprocal. Furthermore, manifestos as research objects shape not only the theories made about them but also the identities of the theorists and other research-ers. Since they are symptoms of a system in instability or crisis (Leroy 1980; Yahalom 1980; Millot 1996),�� manifestos are the place where researchers intervene, like physicians, to diagnose the political/artistic problems and concerns of an epoch or a field. Like the diagnosis of an illness with regard to the doctor, the analysis of the manifesto is empowering for the critic. The manifesto appeals to critics because it is halfway between self-identification and knowledge: the critics recognize themselves in it, since they are after all the ones who “gave the baby its name,” but at the same time they must suspect it for its rhetoric and apply to it their critical faculties. Because it is programmatic discourse seeking to legitimize a speaker on behalf of a group, a movement, or a poetic reform (Millot 1996: 206; Illouz 2005: 113), manifesto language is highly rhetorical and at times even manipulative. Therefore, the researcher must be on the lookout for the manifesto’s hidden agendas. Thus when studying the manifesto, the critic recuperates a part of his or her identity as an interpreter, because he or she is required to uncover the text’s implicit layers.

23. For example, futurism, Dadaism, surrealism, and Oulipo all combine various genres of expression (essays, poetry, aphorisms, definitions, word games) as well as different graphic styles and images.24. In referring to Angenot’s 1982 work on the pamphlet, Kaplan (1983: 78) says: “Where criticism is looking for logic, how can it treat an object which by definition attacks logic? You cannot, for example, merely attack the logic of a pamphlet, for, as Angenot explains, it is precisely a non-logical ground that pamphlets occupy and colonize.”25. By “argument schema” I’m referring to conventional categories of argument found in the vast literature on argumentation, such as argumentation by association, by dissociation, based on the structure of reality, from reciprocity, and so forth.26. Looking into manifestos to account for crisis in art is common in adjacent fields as well. For instance, Maria M. Delgado and Cridad Svich (2002) use it to explain the crisis in con-temporary theater.


The Sociology of the Academic FieldIn Littérature’s 1980 special issue, Abastado (1980a: 3) asks, Is manifesto a good semiotic object? The answer is yes, not because its contours are easily defined but because it has been amply studied. It therefore provides a body of data for those interested in finding out how critics operate in the literary field. It also allows the critic to observe his or her own influence on the literary field. It is flattering to discover that one determines how a text will be read by intervening in the interpretation process as a Hermes between authors and readers. On the other hand, though, the researcher does not determine the meaning of a manifesto single-handedly. Research para-digms play a significant role in determining one’s approach: a researcher will understand and explain manifestos in the light of other scholars’ work and by reference to his or her research environment. Thus to study and analyze the research conducted on manifestos is a good way to understand how a field of knowledge functions in general and how the field of literary research operates in particular. In order to exemplify this point, let us turn to the studies of manifesto in chronological order. A limited number of studies can be found as early as the late 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Mitchell’s 1966 critical anthology of literary manifestos of the Belle Epoque, though not exhaustive, includes a wide variety of texts announcing a durable innovation of literary technique in three different ages: classical Renaissance, symbolism, and socialist art or art “engagé.” The primary purpose of the anthology is thus to create “liter-ary histories” of the periods reviewed (ibid.: 8). Caws’s (1974: 3) Le manifeste et le caché: Langages surréalistes et autres is a collection of academic essays on Dadaist, surrealist, and avant-garde manifestos designed to give a wide array of possible readings of the manifestos concerned without limiting the interpretation to a specific school or theory. We mentioned earlier that manifesto is often related to the family of agonistic discourse. To some extent, interest in such discourse of polemics and of crisis repeats itself in the mid- and late 1970s,�� but its association with the manifesto does not become current until the beginning of the 1980s. Then, in the special issue of the Canadian Etudes françaises, a selec-tion of critical bibliography suggests that manifesto belongs to the family of polemical discourse and is akin to “pamphlet” and “avant-garde.” The two special issues of 1980—the Canadian “Le manifeste poétique/poli-tique” in Etudes françaises and the French “Les manifestes” in Littérature—offer a variety of studies of political, literary, and artistic manifestos in addition to two more general articles: Chouinard (1980) on the history

27. Cf. Morin 1976 and the Etudes littéraires special issue on pamphletary discourse in 1978.


of the manifesto and Abastado’s (1980a) introduction to the analysis of manifestos. Another volume, published the same year in the French Lit-erature Series (Hardee 1980), attempts to limit the manifesto to literature and to French literary movements. The two special issues and the volume on manifestos reflect the early stages of research, when the subject mat-ter is only approximately defined. The list of articles in Littérature suggests eclecticism by its very range: from historical to synchronic definitions and attempts to define the manifesto, from political to artistic (musical, cinematic, pictorial) and literary manifestos, from authorial intentions to reader response, and from theory to particular case studies. The Cana-dian issue, as heterogeneous as its French counterpart, offers a study in the history of manifesto and attempts to distinguish manifesto from other genres and their case studies—Canadian, avant-garde, and others. The bibliographical list of texts considered as manifestos, carrying the subtitle “En vrac, quelques manifestes” (“An Unsorted List of Some Manifestos”), shows the genre’s diversity. It ranges from declared manifestos (such as the Futurist Manifesto, the Surrealist Manifesto, the Communist Manifesto) to texts with manifestary characteristics (Emile Zola’s J’accuse, Moréas’s Le symbolisme, Hugo’s La préface de Cromwell ), from political manifestos (the Communist one, “Manifeste des 121” on the war in Algeria) to artistic and literary manifestos (that of Oulipo or of Dadaism), from manifestos of gen-der to manifestos of minorities (the suffragettes, Le manifeste des femmes qué-bécoises, Michèle Lalonde’s Speak White). The idea that the genre is still undelimited is reflected in the compiler’s hesitation between what is mani-festo and what is not: some of the texts included in the list (such as L’oeuvre de Lautréamont) come with a question mark. The French Canadians’ special interest in the discourse of contest becomes obvious when, in 1982, the French Canadian scholar Angenot publishes his magnum opus on pamphletary discourse.�� In the same year, at McGill University, Sorel L. Thompson writes a master’s thesis on “Mani-festo: A Preliminary Model for Discourse Analysis.” In 1983 the American L’esprit créateur �� publishes an issue on manifesto and oppositional writing (“contre-écriture”) with a review article by Kaplan entitled “Recent Theo-retical Work with Pamphlets and Manifestoes.”�0 The manifesto as a genre seems even more attractive to the French Canadian eye when Demers and

28. The work is preceded, as I have mentioned before, by a special issue of the Canadian journal Etudes littéraires (1978) on the pamphlet with an introductory article by Angenot carrying the same title as his book—“La parole pamphlétaire.”29. Exploring all periods of French literature and thought, L’esprit créateur studies topics that characterize French and Francophone studies.30. Kaplan surveys the literature on manifesto in French.


Mc Murray publish in 1986 the first book entirely devoted to the topic. The purpose of this work is to create methodological tools for the study of manifesto, to demonstrate the diversity and the ambiguity of its relation-ship to the institution, and to propose a dynamic typology. It is an attempt, in short, to examine the manifesto as a genre. Canadians also made mani-festos and prefaces their focal point in 1990 in Blodgett and Purdy’s bilin-gual Préfaces et manifestes littéraires/Prefaces and Literary Manifestoes as part of a larger project of describing the literary institution in Canada.�� The French Canadian special interest in the genre is further demonstrated by two more general dissertations on political and literary manifestos. Heimpel’s 1996 dissertation (University of Toronto, in French), on the literary manifesto’s genealogy, studies the genre from the perspective of critical reception and was published in book form in 2002. Richard Lefebvre’s 2003 dissertation (University of Montreal) returns to the study of the political manifesto in an attempt to define a rhetoric that is particular to it vis-à-vis the liter-ary one. If we are to draw some conclusions about the literary field based on the research conducted on the manifesto, we should devote serious atten-tion to French Canadians’ significant (even dominant) contribution to its study. This seems to be related to their marginal cultural position in North America and peripheral geographical position relative to France. As Diane Poliquin-Bourassa and Daniel Latouche (1980: 32)�� put it: for people living on the fringes of space and time, speaking is no luxury but often the only way to prove to oneself that one is alive. Thus from the perspective of the reader, political manifestos are testimonies to the vigor with which French Canadians have come to publicize their existence or to the facility with which they tell themselves stories that make them feel they exist. For the people of Quebec, we hear, the political manifesto is a means to claim their place in America or in Canada. By the same token, the relatively prolific scholarly research on the manifesto in Francophone Canada can be explained as a way to produce an independent academic identity vis-à-vis Anglophone North America and even France itself. Thus in imita-tion of their manifestary object of research, they act as the avant-garde in academic research, exploring new territories and gradually moving them from the periphery toward the center. To study declarative literary writing is also to characterize the literary institution of a given culture or even to invent it. This is the case with an

31. This collection is the proceedings of the third in a series of conferences entitled “Towards a History of the Literary Institution in Canada.”32. In the Canadian Etudes françaises (1980) special issue on manifesto.


early dissertation written in the United States by James Marvin Hutchis-son (1987), who examines the history of the literary institution in America through the history of the study of the manifesto in it. Hutchisson shows thereby how manifestos, defined as hortatory documents “that were intended as or came to be known as a proclamation about the condition of American letters” (ibid.: 4), are in fact related to and representative of major movements in American literature (nationalism, realism, Imag-ism, proletarianism, postmodernism, etc.) and the literary controversies they generated or sustained (ibid.: 6). American literature is invented via manifestos, in opposition to English literature. Finally, the manifesto as a distinct genre seems to reflect American society’s national ethos: some authors, like the poet Walt Whitman, thus organized the ideas of the Young America movement (which initiated the first true campaign for literary nationalism in America [ibid.: 8]) into one cogent statement (ibid.: 9). Later works on the manifesto written and published in America (Lyon 1999; Somigli 2003) no longer question the existence of the genre. Eman-cipated from the need to devise a typology to accommodate the manifesto, which is by now established as a distinctive text type,�� they are free to develop a more complex outlook on it. For example, Lyon (1991, 1999) studies how feminist polemics relate to the development of modern spheres of public contestation and debate via the history and theory of the mani-festo. In her 1991 article, she compares numerous manifestos written by women, such as Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967), “Combat pour la lib-eration de la femme” (1970), the Redstockings Manifesto (1970), Donna J. Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991 [1985]), and Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays. In her 1999 book, Lyon extends her work to the modern public sphere and examines, among other things, how early prototypes, like the tracts of the Diggers and Levellers of 1650, evolved into modern incarna-tions, such as the 1918 Dada Manifesto and the 1992 Dyke Manifesto. She suggests that “the manifesto as a genre is constitutive of the public sphere to the degree that it persistently registers the contradictions within modern political life” (Lyon 1999: 8). Again, Winkiel’s 1999 dissertation examines the relationship between manifestos and novels to define the role of the masses in inspiring mani-festo aesthetics. For example, she studies the relation between Elizabeth

33. Once the literary manifesto is taken as an established genre by scholars, the frameworks and tools developed for its analysis are then recycled and used to explore political mani-festos. It is not surprising, then, to find in a recent dissertation the desire to investigate the political manifesto with tools that are not borrowed from literature (Lefebvre 2003). Literary studies of the manifesto, Lefebvre (ibid.: summary, iii) claims, have either ignored the politi-cal variety or applied to it the tools of fictional analysis unsuitable for such research.


Robins’s 1907 popular novel The Convert and the British women’s suffrage movment.�� In a recent article, Winkiel (2006) claims, among other things, that the history of the manifesto form transmits the racial contradictions of Enlightenment discourse to the avant-garde. Borrowing “the differential treatment in regard to those peoples in the periphery (as exemplified in Kant’s notorious anthropological writings . . .), European national com-munities are differentially constituted as modern, rational, universal com-munities that are bounded within a clearly demarcated territory” (ibid.: 68). And she adds, “Just as philosophies of modernity depended on racial-ized difference to construct the modern subjects and communities, the manifesto genre, too, has long depended upon racial myths to ground its creation of communities, who break from the past in order to realize their liberties. . . . [The manifestos of modernity] rely on ‘recognizing’ com-munity and its destiny often in racial terms. In periods of revolutionary activity, when the public sphere is expanded as pamphlets, manifestoes, newsletters, journals, posters, broadsides, increase exponentially, the rhe-torics of race and liberty are conjoined” (ibid.: 69). Finally, Puchner (2006) extends the boundaries of the genre by invent-ing a new subcategory, “manifesto art,” covering works of art infiltrated by characteristics of the manifesto, such as collages, plays, poems, and theatrical performances. The rich Wikipedia entry in English entitled “Art Manifesto,” is concerned with the definition of the genre. Heavily relying on Puchner’s (2000) definition of the artistic manifesto, the Wikipedia entry views it as a hybrid form, where the aesthetic interests of a group of artists are combined with a political declamation. The entry’s interest resides not in the definition it gives but rather in the large number of manifestos com-mented on as well as in its extension to present-day Internet manifestos, which have not yet been studied in current scholarship. It starts with the Futurist Manifesto in 1909 and extends to the contemporary “cyber mani-festos” (for example, Haraway’s 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto”) and mani-festos published on the World Wide Web (for instance, Kerry Mitchell’s 1999 “The Fractal Art Manifesto”).

Concluding Remarks

The manifesto becomes a distinct genre owing to academic research. Once established as such, its study turns to look for new forms that may be included in the family of manifestos. So writing on manifestos has con-tributed not only to the increase of knowledge but also to the shaping and

34. She develops this point further in a later article (Winkiel 2004).


structuring of the literary field. The advance of manifesto scholarship from periphery to center represents the possibility of repositioning in this field: marginal academic domains and groups change their status by advocating a new research program. Studies of the manifesto played such a role for French Canadian literary scholars. Kaplan’s (1983) claim that theoretical research imitates its subject matter can thus be partly justified: peripheral research “centers” choose marginal themes, “marginal” in two senses. First, manifestos are written and acted out by marginal groups. Second, manifestos were originally of minor inter-est to scholars in the literary field and gained interest by degrees, primarily thanks to their “promotion” by French Canadian scholars. Paradoxically, the choice of marginal subject matters by peripheral research centers helps the latter improve their position in the global literary critical field. Finally, the manifesto is identified by being associated with “families” or types of discourse (polemic, crisis, avant-garde, etc.) while differentiated from other genres (pamphlet, preface, proclamation, poem, ars poetica, etc.). Similarly, the identity of critics and scholars as researchers is deter-mined by the object or “family” of objects that they study. The critic is therefore not only responsible for defining his or her object of study (Heim-pel 1999), but in doing so he or she also determines his or her own iden-tity. By drawing the manifesto’s contours, the scholarly specter gains form. This is why studying the writing on manifesto is a good way to seek and gain an understanding, albeit limited, of how the academic literary field functions.

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