Make an argument about the critical utility of the now largely out-of-fashion notion of a unitary concept of “the” avant-garde. Ground your argument in a close reading of and response to Peter Bürger’s 2010 essay “Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde.” This essay was commissioned for the Autumn 2010 issue of New Literary History (vol 41 no. 4), which is devoted to the question “What is an avant-garde?” Among the many goals of that issue, as the introduction by co-editors Jonathan P. Eburne and Rita Felski makes clear, is to develop, contra Bürger, “a more variegated picture of the histories of avant-garde practice, one characterized by nonsynchrony, multiple temporalities, repetition, and difference.” In Bürger’s essay, he seems to want none of that [you can decide if that’s an accurate reading of his argument or not]. What do you make of Bürger’s moves here? You may, if you like, reference other essays in that special issue (Eburne and Felski’s introduction summarizes them well)