Barthes saw avant-garde literature as resistance to, not enforcer of, bourgeois hegemony

Evidence

Barthes cites Camus and Kafka, in fact, on Dominici’s side of the ethical equation (for political ethics are at the center of this piece), over against the bourgeois M. Genevoix, the classical Corneille, and the official language of school essays: … Modernist/avant-garde literary practice, for Barthes, is the champion, ally, voice of the disenfranchised Dominici, not the tool of his oppressor. Camus and Kafka speak with Barthes, to reveal and condemn the power of hegemonic discourse over its victims. Evidently, Camus and Kafka, modernism and the avant-garde, oppose the ”language for school essays,” ”laden … with unreal clichés,” deployed against Dominici. Again, for Barthes as sixties radical, literature is not a monolithic institution of hegemony; in fact, it is precisely modernist/avant-garde sensibility and aesthetic practice that resist bourgeois hegemony. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 246

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Avant-gardes shared an anti-bourgeois stance against market culture — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 217; Postmodern fiction resists from within instead of opposing wholesale — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 945; Literature functions as a pacifying force on the violent outsider — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 116 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Avant-gardes shared an anti-bourgeois stance against market culture #corroborates (0.92) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 217
• The avant-garde attacked art’s institutional status, not merely artistic styles #expands (0.85) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 233
• Modernism’s antibourgeois stance depended on the bourgeoisie it opposed. #qualifies (0.82)
• The same literary form can either contest or reinforce hegemonic narratives #expands (0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 18
• Postmodern fiction resists from within instead of opposing wholesale #complicates (0.78) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 945
• Literature functions as a pacifying force on the violent outsider #contradicts (0.75) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 116
• The avant-garde sought to dissolve art into life praxis, not integrate art into it #expands (0.72)