A military term referring to a group of soldiers who attack in advance of the main body used as a metaphor for any self-consciously advanced or antagonistic position in politics, literature, philosophy, and religion that challenges conventions and is, as it were, ahead of its time. It first came into vogue in the latter part of the nineteenth century in France, where it was used to describe radical and utopia forms of political thinking. The artistic avant-garde arose alongside the political avant-garde, but developed its own way of speaking and thinking about what it meant by the avant-garde. For artists in this period, such as the poet Arthur Rimbaud, artâs goal should be not only to break with the past, but actively to condemn artistic precursors, with a view to creating not merely new works of art but an entirely new artistic language. In this sense the avant-garde is often considered to be more an attitude than a discernible style. Paradoxically, this meant the avant-garde had a built-in limitation: the need constantly to break with tradition and overturn convention meant that it soon came to be seen as mannered and almost a form of self-parody. Its ability to produce new artistic languages was soon exhausted, such that critics often speak of the avant-garde in crisis terms. It is sometimes used as a synonym for modernism, but while there is an element of truth in this, it is misleading too, inasmuch as avant-garde does not imply either a particular period or style. More generally, though, avant-garde is used in critical theory as a code word for the problem of the new, which in the era of postmodernism is considered especially acute because it is thought all possible forms of artistic experimentation have been tried. The notion of the avant-garde is therefore an collocation as well as an artistic or historical problematic in that it contains the question of its own possibility: what does it take to be absolutely new? For this reason, books about the avant-garde tend to focus on its theory rather than its praxis. Further Reading: P. BĂŒrger Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984). M. Calinescu Five Faces of Modernity (1987). R. Poggioli The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968).