In The Historicity of Experience, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek's purpose is to explore, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the major critics of modernity (Heidegger, Benjamin, Lyotard, and Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization.

The four poets Ziarek considers -- Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Bialoszewski, and Susan Howe -- demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics. Moreover, this quartet illustrates how the main operative concepts and strategies of the avant-garde underpinned the practices of canonical writers. A profound philosophical meditation on language, modernity, and the everyday, The Historicity of Experience offers a fundamental reconceptualization of the avant-garde in relation to experience. It is the radicality of this concept, together with its political, aesthetic, and ethical implications, that makes the avant-garde critical forcontemporary reconsiderations of modernity.