Search results for ""author jeff wallace""
Edinburgh University Press Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity: Human and Inhuman
Explores abstraction as a keyword in aesthetic modernism and in critical thinking since Marx Abstraction as the 'missing keyword' in Raymond Williams The writing of abstraction in Marx and Marxism Paul C zanne and Barnett Newman compared as writer-artists of abstraction New readings of abstraction and the inhuman in the experimental writing of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett A close study of Beckett's 'Proustian equation' and its role in a transformed thinking of abstraction Abstraction is one of the most important words in modernism and in the critical thought of modernity, yet its complex work is invariably hidden in plain sight. What do we want from abstraction? Does it refer to thought, or to art? Is it a term of reproach, or of affirmation? Beyond these distinctions, Jeff Wallace's new intellectual history of abstraction in modernism and modernity proposes that abstraction is always uniquely concerned with the importance and revaluation of the inhuman in and for the human. Wallace's case studies range across the writings of Raymond Williams and Paul Val ry, Marx and Marxist aesthetics, the discourse on abstract visual art in C zanne, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Newman, the literary experimentalisms of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett, and the twenty-first-century legacies of modernist abstraction in two forms: the post-Deleuzian resurgence of interest in the philosophies of William James, Henri Bergson and A. N. Whitehead; and the act of looking at the abstract canvas in plays by Yasmina Reza, John Logan and Lee Hall. Contrary to habitual associations of abstraction's difficulty with the exclusivity of high modernism, Wallace finds an inclusive and democratic impulse at the heart of the difficulty itself the promise of an abstraction for all.
£97.49
Manchester University Press Beginning Modernism
Modernism was the artistic and intellectual revolution of the early twentieth century. Yet despite its now-secure location in history, the radical experimental practices of modernism continue to bewilder as much as they excite. Beginning Modernism offers a clear and reader-friendly introduction to this complex and invigorating subject. With an emphasis on the close reading of modernist artefacts, from literary texts to buildings, paintings to musical compositions, the book aims to demystify the notorious difficulties of ‘high’ modernism, showing them to be an incentive rather than an obstacle to understanding and exploration. At the same time, it highlights the emergence of a new modernist studies, emphasizing the eclectic, the popular, and the global or transnational. Readers are encouraged to situate their reading of modernist literature within a wider set of cultural contexts, which include: visual art; ideas of time and space; sculpture; photography; film; politics; technology; sexuality; primitivism; architecture; dance; drama, and music. Beginning Modernism will be of interest both to the general reader, and to undergraduates and postgraduates in the fields of literary studies, art history and cultural studies.
£72.00
