Ethos and performative writing in the avant-garde manifesto: the contribution of female authors and artists Ethos en performatief schrijven in het avant-garde manifest: de bijdrage van vrouwelijke auteurs en kunstenaars

The purpose of this doctoral project is to study the manifestoes signed exclusively by women artists and writers belonging to the three historical avant-gardes. The manifesto marks a breaking point with the past and although it was invested before the twentieth century, it is systematized and reaches its climax with avant-garde groups. The author translates this breaking point by putting in tension his or her discourse and reality, and by performing mainly under the cover of a prophetic posture that results from an acute awareness of his or her ethos. The low participation of women in the elaboration of the so-called 'founding' manifestoes of avant-garde communities comes down to their co-signing. Thus, the main hypothesis of this research is that the manifestoes in the corpus show not only a considerable presence of women artists and authors within the avant-garde movements of the first half of the twentieth century, but above all that their writings mark a double break: one with the dominant though in the avant-garde and one with institutionalized literary and aesthetic conventions.