Destruction Was My Beatrice

Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century

Contributors

By Jed Rasula

Formats and Prices

Price

$19.99

Price

$25.99 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. ebook $19.99 $25.99 CAD
  2. Hardcover $29.99 $37.50 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around June 2, 2015. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

In 1916, as World War I raged around them, a group of bohemians gathered at a small nightclub in Zurich, Switzerland for a series of bizarre performances. Three readers simultaneously recited a poem in three languages; a monocle-wearing teenager performed a spell from New Zealand; another young man flung bits of papier-mâché into the air and glued them into place where they landed. One of these artists called the sessions “both buffoonery and a requiem mass.” Soon they would be known by a more evocative name: Dada.

In Destruction Was My Beatrice, modernist scholar Jed Rasula presents the first narrative history of the emergence, decline, and legacy of Dada, showing how this strange artistic phenomenon spread across Europe and then the world in the wake of the Great War, fundamentally reshaping modern culture in ways we’re still struggling to understand today.
Request Desk/Exam Copy

Genre:

On Sale
Jun 2, 2015
Page Count
384 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9780465066940

Jed Rasula

About the Author

Jed Rasula is the Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Georgia. The author of several scholarly works on literature and modernism, as well as two books of poetry, he lives in Athens, Georgia.

Learn more about this author