Bodies of Modernism

Bodies of Modernism
Author: Maren Linett
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2017
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0472053310

Reveals the links, both positive and negative, between disabled bodies and aspects of modernism and modernity through readings of a wide range of literary texts

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body
Author: Kristina Wilson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0691213496

The first investigation of how race and gender shaped the presentation and marketing of Modernist decor in postwar America In the world of interior design, mid-century Modernism has left an indelible mark still seen and felt today in countless open-concept floor plans and spare, geometric furnishings. Yet despite our continued fascination, we rarely consider how this iconic design sensibility was marketed to the diverse audiences of its era. Examining advice manuals, advertisements in Life and Ebony, furniture, art, and more, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body offers a powerful new look at how codes of race, gender, and identity influenced—and were influenced by—Modern design and shaped its presentation to consumers. Taking us to the booming suburban landscape of postwar America, Kristina Wilson demonstrates that the ideals defined by popular Modernist furnishings were far from neutral or race-blind. Advertisers offered this aesthetic to White audiences as a solution for keeping dirt and outsiders at bay, an approach that reinforced middle-class White privilege. By contrast, media arenas such as Ebony magazine presented African American readers with an image of Modernism as a style of comfort, security, and social confidence. Wilson shows how etiquette and home decorating manuals served to control women by associating them with the domestic sphere, and she considers how furniture by George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames, as well as smaller-scale decorative accessories, empowered some users, even while constraining others. A striking counter-narrative to conventional histories of design, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body unveils fresh perspectives on one of the most distinctive movements in American visual culture.

Body Ascendant

Body Ascendant
Author: Harold B. Segel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1998
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

The revival of the Olympic Games in 1896 was just one result of the unparalleled interest in physical culture that consumed Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author Harold Segel shows that this obsession with physical culture resonated widely through the modernist movement, and he traces its profound influence on the arts in the early 20th century. Illustrated.

The Naked Truth

The Naked Truth
Author: Alys X. George
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2022-01-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226819965

"In the popular imagination, turn-of-the-century Vienna is a cerebral place, marked by Freud, the discovery of the unconscious, and the advent of high modernist culture. But as historian Alys George argues, this stereotype of Viennese Modernism as essentially "heady" overlooks a rich cultural history of the body in the period. Spanning 1870 to 1930, The Naked Truth is an interdisciplinary tour de force that recasts the visual, literary, and performative cultures of the era and offers an alternative genealogy of this fascinating moment in the history of the West. Starting with the Second Vienna Medical School and its innovations in anatomy and pathology, George traces an emerging culture of bodily knowledge by analyzing a variety of written and visual media, including theater and dance, and by drawing connections between scientific and artistic discourses. Paying equal attention to both low and high culture, bringing gender and class issues back to the fore, and highlighting the role of female thinkers and writers, George's book makes a signal contribution to our understanding of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Viennese and European culture. The Naked Truth shows us that the "inward turn" cannot be understood until it is set against the backdrop of a culture obsessed with exploring and displaying humanity in its embodied, carnal form"--

Modern Bodies

Modern Bodies
Author: Julia L. Foulkes
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2003-11-03
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0807862029

In 1930, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham proclaimed the arrival of "dance as an art of and from America." Dancers such as Doris Humphrey, Ted Shawn, Katherine Dunham, and Helen Tamiris joined Graham in creating a new form of dance, and, like other modernists, they experimented with and argued over their aesthetic innovations, to which they assigned great meaning. Their innovations, however, went beyond aesthetics. While modern dancers devised new ways of moving bodies in accordance with many modernist principles, their artistry was indelibly shaped by their place in society. Modern dance was distinct from other artistic genres in terms of the people it attracted: white women (many of whom were Jewish), gay men, and African American men and women. Women held leading roles in the development of modern dance on stage and off; gay men recast the effeminacy often associated with dance into a hardened, heroic, American athleticism; and African Americans contributed elements of social, African, and Caribbean dance, even as their undervalued role defined the limits of modern dancers' communal visions. Through their art, modern dancers challenged conventional roles and images of gender, sexuality, race, class, and regionalism with a view of American democracy that was confrontational and participatory, authorial and populist. Modern Bodies exposes the social dynamics that shaped American modernism and moved modern dance to the edges of society, a place both provocative and perilous.

Modernism, Technology, and the Body

Modernism, Technology, and the Body
Author: Tim Armstrong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1998-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521599979

This book is a study of the relations between the body and its technologies in modernism. Tim Armstrong traces the links between modernist literary texts and medical, psychological and social theory across a range of writers, including Yeats, Henry James, Eliot, Stein, and Pound. Armstrong shows how modernist texts enact experimental procedures which have their origins in nineteenth-century psychophysics, biology, and bodily reform techniques, but within a context in which the body is reconceived and subjected to new modes of production, representation and commodification. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, Armstrong challenges the received oppositions between technology and literature, the instrumental and the aesthetic, by demonstrating the leaky boundaries and complex interconnections between these domains. This book offers a cultural history of modernism as it negotiated the enduring fact of the human body in a period of rapid technological change.

Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy

Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy
Author: Nicolas Fernandez-Medina
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2016-03-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317434064

This interdisciplinary volume interrogates bodily thinking in avant-garde texts from Spain and Italy during the early twentieth century and their relevance to larger modernist preoccupations with corporeality. It examines the innovative ways Spanish and Italian avant-gardists explored the body as a locus for various aesthetic and sociopolitical considerations and practices. In reimagining the nexus points where the embodied self and world intersect, the texts surveyed in this book not only shed light on issues such as authority, desire, fetishism, gender, patriarchy, politics, religion, sexuality, subjectivity, violence, and war during a period of unprecedented change, but also explore the complexities of aesthetic and epistemic rupture (and continuity) within Spanish and Italian modernisms. Building on contemporary scholarship in Modernist Studies and avant-garde criticism, this volume brings to light numerous cross-cultural touch points between Spain and Italy, and challenges the center/periphery frameworks of European cultural modernism. In linking disciplines, genres, —isms, and geographical spheres, the book provides new lenses through which to explore the narratives of modernist corporeality. Each contribution centers around the question of the body as it was actively being debated through the medium of poetic, literary, and artistic exchange, exploring the body in its materiality and form, in its sociopolitical representation, relation to Self, cultural formation, spatiality, desires, objectification, commercialization, and aesthetic functions. This comparative approach to Spanish and Italian avant-gardism offers readers an expanded view of the intersections of body and text, broadening the conversation in the larger fields of cultural modernism, European Avant-garde Studies, and Comparative Literature.

Against Voluptuous Bodies

Against Voluptuous Bodies
Author: J. M. Bernstein
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2006
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780804748957

The aim of this book is to provide an account of modernist painting that follows on from the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno. It offers a materialist account of modernism with detailed discussions of modern aesthetics from Kant to Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Adorno. It discusses in detail competing accounts of modernism: Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Yve-Alain Bois, and Thierry de Duve; and it discusses several painters and artists in detail: Pieter de Hooch, Jackson Pollock, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, and Chaim Soutine. Its central thesis is that modernist painting exemplifies a form of rationality that is an alternative to the instrumental rationality of enlightened modernity. Modernist paintings exemplify how nature and the sociality of meaning can be reconciled.