Seminar Says Modern Literature Seeks to Restore Communication

Language today is pretty much dead, agreed most of the panelists of the International Seminar Forum on "Avant-Garde Trends in Europe" Wednesday night.

Some Marxist neo-Avant-Garde writers from Italy, said Sorgio Perosa of the University of Venice, declare that the disintegration of Western society is shown most clearly in its language.

Members of the literary Avant-Garde, he said, are attempting what Eliot and Pound tried to do--to restore language in order to restore communication. Today's almost shock-proof bourgeoisie is now being shocked in a subtler way, through language, Perosa added.

The Avant-Garde movement is, then, a quest for "full sensation, not just echo. We try to sharpen our own eyes," explained Ivan Nagel, Literary Director of the Munich Theater.

Reading a recent line of poetry, "Why don't we gather in front of life the way we gather in front of a burning house?" Lars Beckstrom, poet and editor of Och und Bild, suggested that the meaninglessness of today's language may result from the evident disaffection with life.

The influences of Christianity, Marxism, and Freudism have "withered away," he said. Even interest in Surrealism is fading fast, with only Dadaism enjoying current favor.

James Cumming, a painter from the Edinburgh College of Art, drew applause with his justification of Avant-Garde experimentation. He quoted St. John of the Cross: "In order to go where one knows not, one must go by a way that one known not."