Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism collects, updates, integrates and contextualizes the critic Richard Sheppard's essays on the historical avant-garde. Sheppard's topic in all of these essays is the modernist writers', artists', and philosophers' linguistic and visual responses to a changed sense of reality and human nature. Beginning with an overview of the problematics of European modernism, Sheppard establishes the dialectical relationship between the cultural crisis that occurred during the period 1880-1936 and the different responses from European modernists and the avant-garde. With its...
Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism collects, updates, integrates and contextualizes the critic Richard Sheppard's essays on the historical avant-garde. Shep...
In a pluralistic society without absolute standards of judgment, how can an individual live a moral life? This is the question Robert Musil (1880-1942), an Austrian-born engineer and mathematician turned writer, asked in essays, plays, and fiction that grapple with the moral ambivalence of modern life. Though unfinished, his monumental novel of Vienna in the febrile days before World War I, "The Man without Qualities, " is identified by German scholars as the most important literary work of the twentieth century. In a fresh examination of his essays, notebooks, and fiction, Patrizia...
In a pluralistic society without absolute standards of judgment, how can an individual live a moral life? This is the question Robert Musil (1880-1942...
A figure of reflexivity, narcissism describes a relation between self and other mediated through the mirror or reflection. As such, the concept might help us to consider how what we come to know as the other, or the object, is always the result of a process of image-making. It is in this suggestive sense that narcissism interests Caroline Rupprecht in "Subject to Delusions". Because "the other," or the object, is constructed, Rupprecht finds in narcissism the possibility of rewriting notions of identity. She then pursues this possibility through modern literary texts in which narcissism acts...
A figure of reflexivity, narcissism describes a relation between self and other mediated through the mirror or reflection. As such, the concept might ...
Interruption is often read as the foundational gesture of modernity - the means through which modernity asserts its existence by claiming its discontinuity with the past. Exposing the limitations of such an understanding, this book offers a very different approach: here, modernity is the site that poses the question of how we are to continue when every attempt to think and understand the present is marked by the necessity of an interruption. Through a reading of Walter Benjamin's writings - particularly on interruption, fashion, and Jugendstil (or Art Nouveau) - Andrew Benjamin in this work...
Interruption is often read as the foundational gesture of modernity - the means through which modernity asserts its existence by claiming its disconti...
Exploring the boundaries of one of the most contested fields of literary study--a field that in fact shares territory with philology, aesthetics, cultural theory, philosophy, and even cybernetics--this volume gathers a body of critical writings that, taken together, broadly delineate a possible poetics of the contemporary. In these essays, the most interesting and distinguished theorists in the field renegotiate the contours of what might constitute "contemporary poetics," ranging from the historical advent of concrete poetry to the current technopoetics of cyberspace. Concerned with a...
Exploring the boundaries of one of the most contested fields of literary study--a field that in fact shares territory with philology, aesthetics, cult...
Guy Davenport (1927-2005), an American writer of fiction, poetry, criticism, and essays, a translator, painter, intellectual, and teacher, brought a breadth and depth of knowledge to his pursuits that few other writers could approach, let alone appraise. In Andre Furlani, this twentieth-century American master has finally found an apt critical reader. In this first sustained critical study of Davenport, Furlani elucidates the depths of Davenport's fiction and its poetic precedents, brings a rare understanding to the author's reworking of twentieth-century literature and intellectual history,...
Guy Davenport (1927-2005), an American writer of fiction, poetry, criticism, and essays, a translator, painter, intellectual, and teacher, brought a b...
Nazi Germany s book burnings, its campaign against degenerate art, and its persecution of experimental artists pushed the avant garde to the brink of extinction. How the avant-garde came back, finding a new purpose in the wake of the war, is the subject of "Visions of Violence."
An extreme faction of aesthetic modernity intent on bulldozing contemporary life, the avant-garde has regularly employed visions of violence in their push for societal and cultural renewal. But in the shadow of unparalleled war and genocide, such aesthetic violence lost its force. This book explores the...
Nazi Germany s book burnings, its campaign against degenerate art, and its persecution of experimental artists pushed the avant garde to the brink ...
Oyvind Fahlstrom (1928-76), the Brazilian-born Swedish multi-artist, is one of the mid-twentieth century's most intriguing cultural figures. His work, as profoundly political as it is aesthetic, spans two tumultuous decades in the avant-garde world and comprises concrete poetry (his own innovation), manifestos, plays, performance, filmmaking, paintings, multiple prints, sculpture and installations. Initially poorly received in Sweden and little appreciated in the English-speaking world, Fahlstrom's role as one of the creators of concrete poetry is now increasingly recognized worldwide.The...
Oyvind Fahlstrom (1928-76), the Brazilian-born Swedish multi-artist, is one of the mid-twentieth century's most intriguing cultural figures. His work,...
Rereading and rewriting our understanding of the poetics of modernism and postmodernism, this truly revisionary work identifies a significant counter-tradition in twentieth-century poetry. Postmodernism, Ming-Qian Ma argues, does not so much follow from modernism as coexist with it, with postmodernists employing the anarchic poetics introduced by Gertrude Stein in countering the rationalist method of high modernists such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Grounded in a detailed and compelling account of the philosophy guiding such a project, Ma s book traces a continuity of thought and practice...
Rereading and rewriting our understanding of the poetics of modernism and postmodernism, this truly revisionary work identifies a significant counter-...
This book focuses on the integral, interdisciplinary, and intermedial "compositions"verbal, visual, musical, theatrical, and cinematicof the avant-gardes in the period following World War II. It also considers the artistic politics of these postwar avant-gardes and their works. The book s geographical span is primarily the United States, although in its more extended reach, it comprehends an international context of American postwar cultural hegemony throughout what was once referred to as "the free world."
The works and the artists Miller takes up are those of the so-called...
This book focuses on the integral, interdisciplinary, and intermedial "compositions"verbal, visual, musical, theatrical, and cinematicof the avant-...