SOURCE: "The Shifting Relations of Literature and Popular Music in Postwar England," in Discourse, Vol. 12, No. 1, Fall-Winter, 1989-90, pp. 78-103.

In the following essay, Nehring relates the transformation of literary texts by subculture music groups in postwar England—specifically, the Rolling Stones' appropriation of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and the Sex Pistols' resurrection of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock—to the avant-garde tradition in aesthetic theory, also discussing Colin MacInnes's documentation of the London music scene of the 1950s in his novel Absolute Beginners.

Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, looking back to Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as Dada and Surrealism, describes the true purpose of the avant-garde as the eradication of "art as an institution." That institutional status resulted from specialization, in both the actual "productive and distributive apparatus" and the purveyance by artists, critics, and scholars of ideas about art in the...