In this freewheeling conversation, Timothy Morton and Cary Wolfe will explore the idea of the “avant” and the various ways in which “avantness” has historically been incarnated in art, literature, music, and culture. Both authors will discuss the relationship of the idea of the avant to their own work and the extent to which it is or isn’t a useful way to think about ideas of time and temporality, newness and oldness, chronology and succession, beforeness and afterness, and the layered, textured, multi–species spaces in which culture (and not just human culture) happens: Morton in relation to his writings on literature, art, music, and ecology in landmark texts such as Ecology Without Nature, The Ecological Thought, Hyperobjects, and Dark Ecology; and Wolfe in relation to his work as both author (Critical Environments, Animal Rites, and What Is Posthumanism?) and founding editor of the Posthumanities series at the University of Minnesota Press.