This project investigated Jewish avant-gardists’ integration into and influence on Western literary cultures and experimental writing. The project argued that Judaism influenced the French and German avant-gardes through Jewish artists and that this influence manifests itself in the pictorial arts, in literature (poetry, prose, literary criticism) as well as in philosophy. The project sought to revise traditional views of the so-called ‘historical’ avant-gardes by reconsidering the East-West cultural and literary exchange. Looking in particular at Jewish avant-gardists who came from the Centre and East of Europe, the project aimed to expose how Judaism was a major contributing factor in avant-garde poetics. The project thus filled an important lacuna in the vibrant field of avant-garde studies, not in the least because the role of Jewish writers also leads us, in ways hitherto unexplored, to reconsider the function of tradition in the avant-garde.

Selected article output:

• Sjöberg, S. 2014, 'Fragments of Multilingualism and Anti-Realism. Paul Celan and Isidore Isou as Proponents of Romanian Jewish Experimental Literature', Philologica Jassyensia, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 219-232.
• ___ . 2014, 'Remaking the Present through Language: Messianic Time in the Works of Yvan Goll and Isidore Isou contra Benjamin and Agamben', Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, vol. 2014, pp. 1-16.
• ___ . 2013, 'Mysticism of Immanence: Lettrism, Sprachkritik, and the Immediate Message', Partial Answers, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 53-69.