The Avant-Garde Utopias of Tzara, Isou and Luca: Language, Politics, and Multimodality

The twentieth century was wounded by war, the Holocaust, social inequalities, and rising nationalism. Avant-garde artists of Jewish origin from the Kingdom of Romania responded to these crises by imagining utopias that challenged dominant ideas of identity, art and politics. Politically engaged, they moved from linguistic to multimodal experimentation. The utopian dimension of the avant-garde remains understudied, with scholarship emphasising its nihilistic gestures. This thesis addresses that gap through three case studies: Tristan Tzara, Ghérasim Luca and Isidore Isou, arguing that utopias emerge through a dual practice of deconstruction followed by reconstruction. Beyond destabilising established forms, Tzara, Luca and Isou created alternative ways of imagining language, politics and multimodal art. Chapter 1 analyses how language is deterritorialised to become sound. Chapter 2 examines artistic resistance to authority and the alternatives it creates. Chapter 3 analyses deconstruction and reconstruction in multimodal art. Methodologically, the thesis brings together Julia Kristeva’s concepts of ‘semiotic’ and ‘symbolic’, referring respectively to the pre-linguistic dimensions of language (such as rhythm and musicality) and to its structured rules (such as grammar and syntax), with Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between ‘striated’ and ‘smooth’ space, or between controlled and hierarchical spaces and more open, fluid and affective ones. This framework is applied to overlooked works and rare archival materials by Tzara, Luca and Isou in both Romanian and French, drawn from archives in Paris. These materials reveal a recurring return to the semiotic as a response to symbolic authority and show that avant-garde art did not merely reject dominant forms but reshaped them. By foregrounding the constructive and transformative dimension of the avant-garde, this thesis repositions utopia as a practice of reconfiguration. It argues that avant-garde art can render symbolic structures more fluid, affective and sensorial, opening space for new forms of subjectivity, politics and artistic expression.