The Senses of Modernism

The Senses of Modernism
Author: Sara Danius
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2002
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780801488009

In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius develops a radically new theoretical and historical understanding of high modernism. The author analyses works by Mann, Proust and Joyce as narratives of the sweeping changes that affected high and low culture.

The Senses of Modernism

The Senses of Modernism
Author: Sara Danius
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2019-01-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 150172116X

In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius develops a radically new theoretical and historical understanding of high modernism. The author closely analyzes Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and James Joyce's Ulysses as narratives of the sweeping changes that affected high and low culture in the age of technological reproduction. In her discussion of the years from 1880 to 1930, Danius proposes that the high-modernist aesthetic is inseparable from a technologically mediated crisis of the senses. She reveals the ways in which categories of perceiving and knowing are realigned when technological devices are capable of reproducing sense data. Sparked by innovations such as chronophotography, phonography, radiography, cinematography, and technologies of speed, this sudden shift in perceptual abilities had an effect on all arts of the time.Danius explores how perception, notably sight and hearing, is staged in the three most significant modern novels in German, French, and British literature. The Senses of Modernism connects technological change and formal innovation to transform the study of modernist aesthetics. Danius questions the longstanding acceptance of a binary relationship between high and low culture and describes the complicated relationship between modernism and technology, challenging the conceptual divide between a technological culture and a more properly aesthetic one.

Eyesight Alone

Eyesight Alone
Author: Caroline A. Jones
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 600
Release: 2005
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0226409538

Even a decade after his death, Clement Greenberg remains controversial. One of the most influential art writers of the twentieth century, Greenberg propelled Abstract Expressionist painting-in particular the monumental work of Jackson Pollock-to a leading position in an international postwar art world. On radio and in print, Greenberg was the voice of "the new American painting," and a central figure in the postwar cultural history of the United States. Caroline Jones's magisterial study widens Greenberg's fundamental tenet of "opticality"-the idea that modernist art is apprehended through "eyesight alone"-to a broader arena, examining how the critic's emphasis on the specular resonated with a society increasingly invested in positivist approaches to the world. Greenberg's modernist discourse, Jones argues, developed in relation to the rationalized procedures that gained wide currency in the United States at midcentury, in fields ranging from the sense-data protocols theorized by scientific philosophy to the development of cultural forms, such as hi-fi, that targeted specific senses, one by one. Greenberg's attempt to isolate and celebrate the visual was one manifestation of a large-scale segmentation-or bureaucratization-of the body's senses. Working through these historical developments, Jones brings Greenberg's theories into contemporary philosophical debates about agency and subjectivity. Eyesight Alone offers artists, art historians, philosophers, and all those interested in the arts a critical history of this generative figure, bringing his work fully into dialogue with the ideas that shape contemporary critical discourse and shedding light not only on Clement Greenberg but also on the contested history of modernism itself.

Modernism

Modernism
Author: Tim Armstrong
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2005-06-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0745629830

This volume combines a clear overview for those with no prior knowledge or experience of modernism with a subtle argument that will appeal to higher level undergraduates and scholars.

Dissensuous Modernism

Dissensuous Modernism
Author: Allyson C. DeMaagd
Publisher:
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: English literature
ISBN: 9780813069166

Placing women writers at the center of the sensory and technological experimentation that characterized the modernist movement, Dissensuous Modernism shows how women of the era challenged gendered narratives that limited their power and agency and waged dissent through their radical sensuous writing. Allyson DeMaagd critiques an overemphasis among modernist writers and generations of researchers on the "masculine" senses of sight and sound, shifting the conversation toward the "feminine" senses of smell, taste, and touch. These senses, long considered "lower," were explored by writers such as H.D., Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bowen, as DeMaagd demonstrates through detailed close readings of their lesser-studied novels. DeMaagd's analysis shows how these women incorporated technology in their work to reunify the senses or to draw attention to the destructive disunity of the senses, highlighting the subversive potential of sensory integration. Dissensuous Modernism illuminates how modernist women writers breached the sensory borders society erects between men and women, heteronormativity and queerness, ability and disability, technology and nature, and human and nonhuman. It elevates diverse embodied experiences and illuminates the pivotal role of women in modernist sensory thought.

Five Faces of Modernity

Five Faces of Modernity
Author: Matei Călinescu
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 1987
Genre: Avant-Garde (Aesthetics)
ISBN: 9780822307679

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.

Disciplining Modernism

Disciplining Modernism
Author: P. Caughie
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2016-01-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230274293

A Poiret dress, a Catholic shrine in France, Thomas Wallis's Hoover Factory building, an Edna Manley sculpture, the poetry of Bei Dao, the internal combustion engine- what makes such artifacts modernist? Disciplining Modernism explores the different ways disciplines conceive modernism and modernity, undisciplining modernist studies in the process.

Still Modernism

Still Modernism
Author: Louise Hornby
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2017
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0190661224

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-232) and index.

Haptic Modernism

Haptic Modernism
Author: Abbie Garrington
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2015-05-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748682546

This book contends that the haptic sense - combining touch, kinaesthesis and proprioception - was first fully conceptualised and explored in the modernist period, in response to radical new bodily experiences brought about by scientific, technological and