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The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess. Andrei Codrescu. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. 235. $16.95 (paperback).
We received an unusually high degree of interest in The Posthuman Dada Guide. For this reason, we have decided to print two responses to Codrescu's book.
Andrei Codrescu, MacCurdy Distinguished Professor at Louisiana State University, is the editor of the journal Exquisite Corpse, a prolific prose and poetry writer, essayist, translator, and a well-known National Public Radio commentator. The present volume is the result of his lifelong brotherly affinity with dada. At the end of the 1960s, when he started publishing in the United States, Codrescu defined himself as "Comrade Past and Mister Present." An author now revered in the literary circles of his native Romania, he can afford to produce his own version of avant-garde in general and modern Romanian literary history in particular.
While it takes its cue from an imaginary game of chess, the book is in fact a witty pointer into the real fabric of contemporary art and politics. It is structured as a guide with entries ordered alphabetically "with a tip of hat to the kabbalah" (19). We are familiar with most of the names, concepts, and places but this is nothing like a dictionary of received ideas. According to its author, it works by answering questions about the story of dada, while each answer corresponds to Codrescu's view of it. Even if we do not necessarily buy into his all-inclusive framing, we can only appreciate the comprehensive quality of his project. Codrescu knows how to combine "Lenin," "Joyce," "Henri Michaux," "money," "negerdichte," "new year's resolution by my poetry students, 2008," and "waking up". An informed cicerone of the avant-garde, the author allows...