Taken literally, the avant-garde refers to the front part of a marching army, the scouts that first head into unknown territory. As a metaphor, the word has been used from the 19th century onward to refer to progressive political and artistic movements that considered themselves to be ahead of their time. The avant-garde is struggling against the old, heading toward the new. It is radical and controversial, fighting against consensus and looking for disruption. The avant-garde radicalizes the basic principle of modernity: the urge toward continual change and development. According to Matei Calinescu (1987), its very radicality drives it to a conscious quest for crisis: Because the avantgarde attitude implies the bluntest rejection of such traditional ideas as those of order, intelligibility, or even success, its protagonists seek for an art that is to become an experience, deliberately conducted, of failure and crisis. The most characteristic feature of the avant-garde, therefore, migh...