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Dadaism

Movement
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

An avant-garde art and literary movement that rejected logic, reason, and traditional aesthetics, emphasizing nonsense and irrationality

Detailed Definition
Dadaism was an early 20th-century avant-garde movement that rejected logic, aestheticism, and bourgeois values through absurdity, chance operations, and anti-art gestures; in poetry, Dadaists like Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball employed nonsense syllables, typographical chaos, and random composition to dismantle language’s referential function and expose the irrationality of war and modernity, laying groundwork for later experimental forms.
Example
Example in poetry:
Dadaism: "Blonk blonk zang tuffet / mustard moon in socks"; "I am a typewriter eating its own keys"; "Nonsense is the only sense left standing"; "Poem? No. Anti-poem! Anti-everything!"
Additional Notes
Dadaism (1916-1924) rejected rationality after WWI, using absurdity and chance. Related to Dada poem. Influenced Surrealism. Key figures: Tzara, Ball, Arp. Revolutionary anti-art movement questioning all artistic conventions.
Also Known As
Anti-art movement Nonsense poetry Absurdist verse Chaos aesthetic Dada movement Dadaist poetics
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