“This overheated and distasteful little book—for me the wrong book in many ways—addresses matters about which there is, precisely, nothing left to say.” The Rutgers University library believed this antihype and never purchased Paul Mann's The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (1991), a book so amusingly dour, so relentlessly dialectical, as to be, for me, irresistible. A member of Mike Sell's Vectors of the Avant-Garde seminar at last month's ASTR, I decided really to read instead of skim my Alibris-purchased copy of Mann's distasteful little book. In it the main figures of futurism, dada, and surrealism become a failed or self-recuperating aggregate whose discourse of inflammatory “anti-” stances served only to undermine their revolutionary intentions: “[T]he avant-garde's assaults on tradition, cultural establishments, and the formal structure of the work of art tended to place it in the service of, not . . . the revolution, but of its deferral, its displacement. . . . The avant-garde's historical agony is grounded in the brutal paradox of an opposition that sustains what it opposes precisely by opposing it” (11).