Paul Klee's art found broad impact upon philosophers of varying commitments, including Hans-Georg Gadamer. Moreover, Klee himself was not only one of the most important artists of aesthetic modernism but one of its leading theoreticians, and much in his work, as in Gadamer's, originated in post-Kantian literary theory's explications of symbol and allegory. Indeed at one point in Truth and Method, Gadamer associates his project for a general "theory of hermeneutic experience" not only with Goethe's metaphysical account of (...) the symbolic but equally with a "rehabilitation" of allegory. In this paper, I examine this position and Gadamer's own use of it in his analysis of Klee's work, contrasting it with that of Walter Benjamin's account of allegory, equally indebted to Goethe and this archive. Finally, I contrast the resulting interpretations of Klee, discussing the implications that evolve for understanding both Gadamer and Benjamin— but equally for understanding Klee's work and, provisionally, the work of art, thus construed, for philosophy. (shrink)

"Cult of ugliness," Ezra Pound’s phrase, powerfully summarizes the ways in which modernists such as Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and T. E. Hulme—the self-styled "Men of 1914"—responded to the "horrid or sordid or disgusting" conditions of modernity by radically changing aesthetic theory and literary practice. Only the representation of "ugliness," they protested, would produce the new, truly "beautiful" work of art. They dissociated the beautiful from its traditional embodiment in female beauty, and from its association with Walter (...) Pater and Oscar Wilde. Their cultivation of ugliness displaced misogyny and homophobia. Higgins takes in texts such as John Ruskin’s art criticism, Eliot’s literary journalism, Lewis’s pro-fascism pamphlets, and the poetry of Pound, Conrad Aiken, and Langston Hughes. She demonstrates that even vigorous champions of beauty were committed to aesthetic practices that disempowered female figures in order to articulate new truths of male artistic mastery. (shrink)

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and (...) aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles. (shrink)

In Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience Jessica Feldman sheds a pragmatist light on the relation between the Victorian age and Modernism by dislodging truistic notions of Modernism as an art of crisis, rupture, elitism and loss. She examines aesthetic sites of Victorian Modernism - including workrooms, parlours, friendships, and family relations as well as printed texts and paintings - as they develop through interminglings and continuities as well as gaps and (...) breaks. Examining the works of John Ruskin (art critic and social thinker), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (poet and painter), Augusta Evans (best-selling domestic novelist,) and William James (philosopher and psychologist), Feldman relates them to selected twentieth-century creations. She reveals these sentimental, domestic and sublime works to be pragmatist explorations of aesthetic realms. This study, which leads Modernism back into the Victorian age, will be of interest to scholars of literature, art history, and philosophy. (shrink)

The role and influence of Modernism is the focus of this article. Modernism’s lasting and unforeseeable influence is due to its key importance to the development of the general conditions of art within modernity. Along with Modernism, the implications of the modern system of art became visible for real. Modernism produced the necessity of rethinking the distinction between “art” and “the aesthetic,” based on their original foundations in the 18th century, respectively – a call for (...) a “divorce” after the long-lived marriage between the two, installed by Romanticism. Furthermore so-called postmodernism and today’s contemporary art have in fact not, as often assumed, really broken with high Modernism. What we see is rather a transformation of a time-based modus into a more spatially defined approach. The interpretations of Modernism itself are thus being altered, when regarded with a postmodern awareness of its surrounding enunciative space. The interrelationship between the modernisms, and what followed, is therefore achieving the character of an entanglement rather than that of a straight and clear development. Modernism’s influence, it is finally asserted, is seemingly not at its conclusion, but rather at its reoccurring beginning. (shrink)

This book explores how Modernist movements all across the Mediterranean basin differed from those of other regions. The chapters show how the political and economic turmoil of a period marked by world war, revolution, decolonization, nationalism, and the rapid advance of new technologies compelled artists, writers, and other intellectuals to create a new hybrid Mediterranean Modernist aesthetic which sought to balance the tensions between local and foreign, tradition and innovation, and colonial and postcolonial.

This volume proposes an in-depth exploration of the materiality of art and writing in modernism and the avant-garde. The essays explore how the avant-gardes and modernism attempted to establish the material specificity and hybridityof media and art forms. The collection sheds light on the full range and import of the aesthetics of matter in avant-garde and modernist practice across all art forms from the 19th century to the present day.

Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-siècle field of “physiological aesthetics,” which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to appreciate beauty and art, changed the way poets, artists, and musicians worked and brought a dramatic transformation to the idea of art itself.

How has political revolution figured into the development of avant-garde cultural production? Is the vanguard an antiquated concept or does its influence still resonate in the 21st century? Focusing closely on the convergence of aesthetics and politics that materialized in the early part of the twentieth century, this study offers a re-interpretation of the historical avant-garde from 1917 to 1962, a turbulent period in intellectual history which marked the apex, crisis, and decline of vanguardist authority. Moving from the impact of (...) the Bolshevik Revolution to the anti-imperialist and decolonizing movements in the Third World, to the emergence of neo-vanguardism in the wake of postmodernity, this study opens the way for understanding the transformation of vanguardist cultural paradigms from a global perspective, the implications of which also reveal its relevance and application to the contemporary period. (shrink)

This volume studies a range of modernist works by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and James Joyce to explore what Modernism looks like when viewed through the lens of disability.

American outlier writer William S. Burroughs was a creative force – an homme de lettres in his own right, yes, but as a cultural theorist as well, particularly his anticipation of what we now regularly call ‘a society of control’ or ‘a surveillance culture’, and, moreover, as a textual embodiment as well. That is, Burroughs was as much a media theorist and performance artist as he was a traditional literary figure, what we generally call a writer, or novelist, although he (...) lauded those latter categories. Through such multimodality he offered critiques of a ‘control society’ and of ‘thought control’ by a media that strips us of volition. In his lectures on Michel Foucault delivered at the Université de Paris VIII in the 1980s, Gilles Deleuze detailed Burroughs's influence on both philosophers with his critique of our ‘control societies’, a term they adopted from him. These critiques of what Burroughs calls ‘thought control’ were and currently remain inseparable from his emergence as a performance artist, such embodiment of his art readily available amid our own image-obsessed electronic revolution. That is, the products of this period are currently being recirculated through commercial media outlets and through multiple open access formats to suggest – to confirm – that the artist whom many another ‘outsider’ has called ‘the Priest’ and who saw himself as a ‘cosmonaut of inner space’ and ‘a technician of consciousness’, this dystopic modernist author, visionary science fiction writer, and aesthetic weapons maker was one of the major media artists, social critics, cultural theorists and literary figures not only of his but of our ‘postpersonal’ time. Michel Foucault closes The Order of Things by imagining a time when ‘man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’. The closing image was crafted some fifteen years before Foucault met Burroughs in New York in 1975, but in the 1960s Burroughs, too, was already imagining and theorising the disappearing author and a post-human, media-dominated world. Such lines of thought suggest parallel trajectories that Deleuze will see as bridging philosopher and artist if not philosophy and art. (shrink)

When discussing the changing sense of reality around 1900 in the cultural arts the lexicon of early modernism reigns supreme. This essay contends that a critical condition for the possibility of many of the turn of the century modernist movements in the arts can be found in exchange of instruments, concepts, and media of representation between the sciences and the arts. One route of interaction came through physiological aesthetics, the attempt to ‘elucidate physiologically the nature of our Aesthetic (...) feelings’ and explain how works of art achieve their effects. Physiological aesthetics provided the terms for new formalist languages of art and criticism, and in some instances suggested optimistic, even utopian, possibilities for art to remake human individuals and societies.Keywords: Physiology; Psychology; Evolution; Aesthetics; Modernism; Art history. (shrink)

Recently criticism and theory have maintained that Kant's aesthetic theory is central to modernism, and have used Foucault's archaeology to interrogate that modernism. This paper suggests that archaeology ultimately cannot escape Kant's hold because it depends on Kantian theses. The first section will consider how a recent exponent of an 'archaeological' viewpoint characterizes Kant's theory and will set out the critical role Kant ascribes to art. The second section compares Kant and Foucault to argue that despite appearances (...) their projects turn out to be substantially coterminal. My interest in comparing these critics is not only to be provocative but also to show that post-modernist thinking, at least in the guise of Foucault, needs and uses standards that Kant proposes. (shrink)

Using the literary work of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of the Italian Futurist movement and an early associate of Mussolini, the author explores the point of contact between a "progressive" aesthetic practice and a "reactionary" political ideology.

Several critics of Foucault, notably Alan Megill and Jürgen Habermas, accuse Foucault of being an ‘aestheticist’. As such, Foucault fails to realise that the very appeal to aesthetics is made possible by modernity's rationalization, which offers better resources for emancipation than dangerous aestheticizations. This paper argues that such criticisms mistakenly deploy only certain modernist notions of aesthetics against Foucault. There are some fair grounds for holding that Foucault does appeal to such conceptions of aesthetics in his theorization of transgression, not (...) least because of his interest in modernist, avant‐garde writers and artists such as Roussel and Magritte. Yet, overall, Foucault's interest in avant‐garde aesthetics is not modernist in the sense understood by his critics. Foucault tends to focus on modernist illustration of the absence of foundations for representation and language, adopting a paraesthetic angle of critique. The limiting conditions that make representation possible can be seen in this light as both contingent yet necessary. Foucault's model of critique is developed in his early analyses of avant‐garde art and then expanded to cover subjectivity and the aesthetics of existence in his later philosophical critical ethos of modernity. Foucault uses avant‐garde art as a critical mode of reflection, to analyse and rethink the limits of the present. (shrink)

El artículo ilumina los modos rivales de articular el modernismo estético y socialismo propuestos hacia fines del siglo XIX por Rubén Darío, Leopoldo Lugones y Manuel Ugarte. Tomando como hilo conductor las disímiles acepciones del término “burgués” por las que parecen haber optado estos escritores, reconstruimos el deslindamiento que intenta Darío entre las dos tendencias modernizadoras, luego analizamos la conexión entre modernismo y socialismo revolucionario que realiza Lugones en el periódico La Montaña (1897), para finalmente explorar los cuestionamientos del joven (...) Ugarte al “esteticismo descomprometido” de Darío y al “socialismo aristocratizante” de Lugones, así como su alianza con el “socialismo pedagógico” de Juan B. Justo. The article focuses on the rival ways of linking aesthetic modernism and socialism that were proposed by Rubén Darío, Leopoldo Lugones and Manuel Ugarte at the end of the 19th century. Taking as a thread the dissimilar meanings of the term “bourgeois”, we rebuild the intent of Darío to mark the boundaries of the two modernizing tendencies; then we analyze the connection between modernism and revolutionary socialism that Lugones proposes in the newspaper La Montaña (1897); finally we explore Ugarte’s arguments with Darío’s “uncompromising aestheticism” and Lugones’ “aristocratizing socialism”, as well as the alliance of Ugarte with the “pedagogical socialism” of Juan B. Justo. (shrink)

Rich with historical and cultural value, these works are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

David Ellison's book is an investigation into the historical origins and textual practice of European literary Modernism. Ellison's study traces the origins of Modernism to the emergence of early German Romanticism from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and emphasizes how the passage from Romanticism to Modernism can be followed in the gradual transition from the sublime to the uncanny. Arguing that what we call High Modernism cannot be reduced to a religion of beauty, an experimentation with (...) narrative form, or even a reflection on time and consciousness, Ellison demonstrates that Modernist textuality is characterized by the intersection, overlapping, and crossing of aesthetic and ethical issues. Beauty and morality relate to each other as antagonists struggling for dominance within the related fields of philosophy and theory on the one hand and imaginative literature on the other. (shrink)

Spoiled Distinctions investigates crises of evaluation in twentieth-century France. Taking Marcel Proust as its central figure, the book theorizes the disorienting force of everyday aesthetic experience. In a series of surprising readings, Hannah Freed-Thall frees Proust from his reputation as the most refined of high modernists. The author of In Search of Lost Time appears here as a journalist and newspaper enthusiast, a literary ventriloquist and connoisseur of popular scandals, and a writer attentive to the unsophisticated phenomenology of the (...) here and now.The final chapters of the book consider the legacy of Proust's experiments with inestimable worth. Authors Francis Ponge, Nathalie Sarraute, and Yasmina Reza also explore the underside of cultural distinction. With Proust, they elaborate modernist variations on the beautiful and sublime--from nuance to the "whatever" and from the awkward to the sickly-sweet. Spoiled Distinctions thus revitalizes the critical discourse on aesthetics. Mapping the intersection of phenomenology, aesthetic theory, and the sociology of culture, the book reveals how enchanting the ordinary can be. (shrink)

In this book, the author seeks to clarify this apprehensive perception of art.

Projections of Memory is an exploration of a body of innovative cinematic works that utilize their extraordinary scope to construct monuments to the imagination that promise profound transformations of vision, selfhood, and experience. This form of cinema acts as a nexus through which currents from the other arts can interpenetrate. By examining the strategies of these projects in relation to one another and to the larger historical forces that shape them--tracing the shifts and permutations of their forms and aspirations--Projections of (...) Memory remaps film history around some of its most ambitious achievements and helps to clarify the stakes of cinema as a twentieth-century art form. (shrink)

_Five Faces of Modernity_ is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: _modernity_, _avant-garde_, _decadence_, _kitsch_, and _postmodernism_. The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours—is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if (...) we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. _Five Faces of Modernity_ attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as _classicism_, _baroque_, _romanticism_, _realism_, or _symbolism_ and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity. (shrink)

Byzantium and Modernism -- The Slash (/) as Method -- CODA.

At the heart of some of the most influential strands of philosophical, political, and aesthetic modernism lies the conviction that modernity is fundamentally nihilistic. This book offers a wide-ranging critical history of the concept of nihilism from its origins in French Revolutionary discourse to its place in recent theorizations of the postmodern. Key moments in that history include the concept's appropriation by political activists in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, by Nietzsche in the 1880s, by the European avant-garde and 'high' modernists (...) in the early decades of the twentieth century, by conservative revolutionaries in Germany in the interwar years, and by major theorists in the post-Holocaust period. Focusing in particular on the abiding impact of Nietzsche's claim that art is the 'only superior counterforce' to nihilism, Weller argues that an understanding of modernism (and, indeed, of postmodernism) is impossible without a reflection upon the decisive role played by the concept of nihilism therein. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking new study, Ben Ware carries out a bold reassessment of the relationship between modernism and ethics, arguing that modernist literature and philosophy offer more than simply a snapshot of the moral conflicts of the past: they provide a crucial point of reference for today's emancipatory struggles. Modernism in this assessment is characterized not only by a concern with language and aesthetic creativity, but also by a preoccupation with the question of how to live. Investigating (...) ethical ideas in Wittgenstein, Beckett, Kierkegaard, Kant, Cavell, Marx, Henry James and Lacan, Ware demonstrates how these thinkers can bring us to a new understanding of a constellation of issues which contemporary radical thought must re-visit: utopia, repetition, perfectionism, subtraction, negativity, critique, absence, duty, revolution and political love. The result is a timely and provocative intervention, which re-draws the boundaries for future debates on the ethics and politics of modernism. (shrink)

This book offers, for the first time in aesthetics, a comprehensive account of aestheticism of the 19<SUP>th</SUP> century as a philosophical theory of its own right. Taking philosophical and art-historical viewpoints, this cross-disciplinary book presents aestheticism as the foundational movement of modernist aesthetics of the 20<SUP>th</SUP> century. Emerging in the writings of the foremost aestheticists - Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, James Whistler, and their formalist successors such as Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Clement Greenberg - aestheticism offers a uniquely synthetic (...) definition of art. It captures the artwork’s relations between form and content, art’s independent ontology and autonomy, art’s internal completeness, criticism, immunity to recruitment, the uniqueness of each medium, and musicality, as well as the logical-theoretical affiliation of art for art’s sake to epistemology, ethics and philosophy of language.<BR> Those are used by Michalle Gal to formulate a definition of art in terms of a theory of Deep Formalism, setting aestheticism, which aspires to preserve the artistic medium, as a critique of the current linguistic-conceptual aesthetics that developed after the linguistic turn of aesthetics. (shrink)

Felix Guattari was a modernist. He not only liked a lot of modernist artists, but his ‘aesthetic paradigm’ found its generative diagram in modern art. The most important aspect of this diagram was its insistence on the production of the new, the way it produced a utopian projection of a ‘people to come’, and so a politics whose only horizon was the future. Also important for Guattari's diagram of the ‘modern’ were the forces of abstraction, autonomy and immanent critique. (...) Together these elements construct an artwork that is radically singular and separate, composed of a-signifying, a-temporal and invisible forces, sensations that go beyond our human conditions of possibility. In this Guattari's modernism must be understood as being quite different from his co-option by contemporary art theorists influenced by post-Operaist thought. Post-Operaism understands politics as ‘being-against’, a dialectical form of negation that finds its political condition of possibility in what already exists. Because such thought sees modern art as being entirely subsumed by the institutions and markets that contain it, art itself must be negated in order for aesthetic powers to become political. This has lead post-Operaist thought to align itself strongly with the avant-garde positions of institutional-critique and art-into-life, or ‘non-art’. Guattari's modernism takes him in a very different direction, affirming modern art despite its institutional enframing, because art is forever in the process of escaping itself. This makes modern art the model in Guattari's thought for politics itself. (shrink)

CAROLE BOURNE-TAYLOR AND ARIANE MILDENBERG Introduction: Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond Etat Present It was at the Eleventh Virginia Woolf Conference ...

In this interview, Paul Virilio talks at length about his life and numerous published works ranging from Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology to the recently translated Polar Inertia. Considering important theoretical themes and questions relating to post- and 'hyper'- modernism, poststructuralism, modernity and postmodernity, Virilio discusses his often controversial views on the cultural writings of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Baudrillard. In so doing, Virilio not only clarifies many of his architectural, political and cultural concepts such as 'military (...) space', 'dromology' and the 'integral accident' but also provides much food for thought for all those presently concerned with the social implications of the 'disappearance' of aesthetics, technoculture, information warfare, cloning and 'cyberfeminism'. (shrink)

Rather than focusing on German philosophy or the French avant-gardes, as many books on the history of aesthetics do, Teukolsky takes up British responses to modern art controversies, thus providing a unique view on the development of artistic forms and art history. She considers the plentiful archive of Victorian "art writing"-essays addressed to the visual arts- to reveal the key role played by nineteenth-century writers in the rise of modernist Anglo-American aesthetics. Though Victorians are most often associated with realism, certain (...) art writers promoted a formalism that would come to dominate canons of twentieth-century art. Teukolsky analyzes the canonical writing of authors like John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde alongside texts belonging to the rich field of Victorian print culture--gallery reviews, scientific treatises, satirical cartoons, advertisements, and early photography monographs among them. Spanning the years 1840 to 1910, her argument also adds substance to our understanding of the transition from Victorianism to modernism, a period of especially lively exchange between artists and intellectuals, here narrated with careful attention given to the historical particularities and real events that stamped their imprint on such interactions. (shrink)

Modernist Objects is a unique mix of cultural studies, literature, and visual arts applied to the discrete materiality of modernist objects. Contributors explore the many tensions surrounding the modernist relationship to objects, things, products and artIfacts through the prism of poetry, prose, visual arts, culture and crafts.

The book explores two radical changes of cultural and social paradigm that determined the World after 1945 - Modernism and Postmodernism. From the cataclysmic atmosphere emerged the second wave of Modernism. In art this attitude was manifested in the form of a radical break with the aesthetic and stylistic characteristics of prior generations. In architecture the International Style was born, meanwhile similar "universality" was also a characteristic of musical serialism. From the beginning of the 1970s the wheels (...) again began to turn in the other direction. The powerful destructive will of modernism increasingly waivered, and the period after modernism - postmodernism - began. The book answers questions related to the reasons for these turnarounds, their consequences and their implications. (shrink)