Download or read book Modernism and the Ordinary written by Liesl Olson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernism and the Ordinary overturns conventional accounts of the modernist period as primarily drawn toward the new, the transcendent, and the extraordinary. Liesl Olson shows how modernist writers were preoccupied, instead, with the unselfconscious actions of everyday life, even in times of political crisis and war. Experiences like walking to work, eating a sandwich, or mending a dress were often resistant to shock, and these daily activities presented a counter-force to the aesthetic of heightened affect with which the period is often associated. With attentive and sensitive readings, Modernism and the Ordinary examines works by Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Stevens, Proust, Beckett, and Auden alongside the ideas of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James. In doing so, the book reveals the non-transformative power of the ordinary as one of modernism's most compelling attributes.
Download or read book Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity written by Aaron Jaffe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-03-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this 2005 book, Jaffe examines the interactions of modernist literary fame and celebrity culture in the early twentieth century.
Download or read book Revolution of the Ordinary written by Toril Moi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This radically original book argues for the power of ordinary language philosophy—a tradition inaugurated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and extended by Stanley Cavell—to transform literary studies. In engaging and lucid prose, Toril Moi demonstrates this philosophy’s unique ability to lay bare the connections between words and the world, dispel the notion of literature as a monolithic concept, and teach readers how to learn from a literary text. Moi first introduces Wittgenstein’s vision of language and theory, which refuses to reduce language to a matter of naming or representation, considers theory’s desire for generality doomed to failure, and brings out the philosophical power of the particular case. Contrasting ordinary language philosophy with dominant strands of Saussurean and post-Saussurean thought, she highlights the former’s originality, critical power, and potential for creative use. Finally, she challenges the belief that good critics always read below the surface, proposing instead an innovative view of texts as expression and action, and of reading as an act of acknowledgment. Intervening in cutting-edge debates while bringing Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell to new readers, Revolution of the Ordinary will appeal beyond literary studies to anyone looking for a philosophically serious account of why words matter.
Download or read book Chicago Renaissance written by Liesl Olson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating history of Chicago’s innovative and invaluable contributions to American literature and art from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century This remarkable cultural history celebrates the great Midwestern city of Chicago for its centrality to the modernist movement. Author Liesl Olson traces Chicago’s cultural development from the 1893 World’s Fair through mid-century, illuminating how Chicago writers revolutionized literary forms during the first half of the twentieth century, a period of sweeping aesthetic transformations all over the world. From Harriet Monroe, Carl Sandburg, and Ernest Hemingway to Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olson’s enthralling study bridges the gap between two distinct and equally vital Chicago-based artistic “renaissance” moments: the primarily white renaissance of the early teens, and the creative ferment of Bronzeville. Stories of the famous and iconoclastic are interwoven with accounts of lesser-known yet influential figures in Chicago, many of whom were women. Olson argues for the importance of Chicago’s editors, bookstore owners, tastemakers, and ordinary citizens who helped nurture Chicago’s unique culture of artistic experimentation. Cover art by Lincoln Schatz
Download or read book Ordinary Matters written by Lorraine Sim and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The first major interdisciplinary study of the ordinary in modernist women's literature and photography that demonstrates how their alternative vision of the everyday extends, and often complicates, that of their male contemporaries as well as contemporary everyday life theory"--
Download or read book Modernism and the Marketplace written by Alissa G. Karl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though the relationship of modernist writers and artists to mass-marketplaces and popular cultural forms is often understood as one of ambivalence if not antagonism, Modernism and the Marketplace redirects this established line of inquiry, considering the practical and conceptual interfaces between literary practice and dominant economic institutions and ideas.
Download or read book Against Voluptuous Bodies written by J. M. Bernstein and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Modernism the Lure of Heresy written by Peter Gay and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a brilliant, provocative long essay on the rise and fall and survival of modernism, by the English-languages' greatest living cultural historian.
Download or read book Pragmatic Modernism written by Lisi Schoenbach and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-28 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatic Modernism traces an alternative strain of modernism influenced by pragmatist philosophy and characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and habit rather than spectacular events and radical rupture. Through original readings of Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., this study rediscovers an overlooked cultural and social matrix and suggests an expanded range of responses to modernity.
Download or read book Luxury and Modernism written by Robin Schuldenfrei and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While modernism was publicized as a fusion of technology, new materials, and rational aesthetics to improve the lives of ordinary people, it was often out of reach to the very masses it purportedly served. Luxury and Modernism shows how luxury was present in bold, literal forms in modern designs—from lavish materials and costly technologies to deluxe buildings and household objects—and in subtler ways as well, such as social milieus and modes of living. In a period of social unrest and extreme wealth disparity between the common worker and those at the helm of capitalist enterprises generating immense profits, architects envisioned modern designs providing solutions for a more equitable future. Robin Schuldenfrei exposes the disconnect between modernism's utopian discourse and its luxury objects and elite architectural commissions. Despite the movement's egalitarian rhetoric, many modern designs addressed the desires of the privileged individual. Yet as Schuldenfrei demonstrates, luxury was integral not only to how modern buildings and objects were designed, manufactured, and sold, but has contributed to modernism's appeal to this day. This beautifully illustrated book provides a new interpretation of modern architecture and design in Germany during the heyday of the Bauhaus and the Werkbund, tracing modernism's lasting allure to its many manifestations of luxury. Schuldenfrei casts the work of legendary figures such as Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in an entirely different light, revealing the complexities and contradictions inherent to modernism's promotion and consumption.
Download or read book What Ever Happened to Modernism written by Gabriel Josipovici and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing--a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why. Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization of a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art arriving at a consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or even 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism's key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected--including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions not only about national taste, but about contemporary culture itself. Gabriel Josipovici has spent a lifetime writing and writing about other writers. This book is a strident call to arms and a tour de force of literary, artistic, and philosophical explication that will stimulate anyone interested in art in the twentieth century and today.
Download or read book Modernism and Close Reading written by David James and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book offers new methodological and interpretive avenues for reconceptualising modernism's longstanding relationship to close reading.
Download or read book Prose of the World written by Saikat Majumdar and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyday life in the far outposts of empire can be static, empty of the excitement of progress. A pervading sense of banality and boredom are, therefore, common elements of the daily experience for people living on the colonial periphery. Saikat Majumdar suggests that this impoverished affective experience of colonial modernity significantly shapes the innovative aesthetics of modernist fiction. Prose of the World explores the global life of this narrative aesthetic, from late-colonial modernism to the present day, focusing on a writer each from Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and India. Ranging from James Joyce's deflated epiphanies to Amit Chaudhuri's disavowal of the grand spectacle of postcolonial national allegories, Majumdar foregrounds the banal as a key instinct of modern and contemporary fiction—one that nevertheless remains submerged because of its antithetical relation to literature's intuitive function to engage or excite. Majumdar asks us to rethink the assumption that banality merely indicates an aesthetic failure. If narrative is traditionally enabled by the tremor, velocity, and excitement of the event, the historical and affective lack implied by the banal produces a narrative force that is radically new precisely because it suspends the conventional impulses of narration.
Download or read book Modernism and Physical Illness written by Peter Fifield and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-08 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: T. S. Eliot memorably said that separation of the man who suffers from the mind that creates is the root of good poetry. This book argues that this is wrong. Beginning from Virginia Woolf's 'On Being Ill', it demonstrates that modernism is, on the contrary, invested in physical illness as a subject, method, and stylizing force. Experience of physical ailments, from the fleeting to the fatal, the familiar to the unusual, structures the writing of the modernists, both as sufferers and onlookers. Illness reorients the relation to, and appearance of, the world, making it appear newly strange; it determines the character of human interactions and models of behaviour. As a topic, illness requires new ways of writing and thinking, altered ideas of the subject, and a re-examination of the roles of invalids and carers. This book reads the work five authors, who are also known for their illness, hypochondria, or medical work: D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Winifred Holtby. It overturns the assumption that illness is a simple obstacle to creativity and instead argues that it is a subject of careful thought and cultural significance.
Download or read book Modernism A Very Short Introduction written by Christopher Butler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-29 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compact introduction to modernism--why it began, what it is, and how it hasshaped virtually all aspects of 20th and 21st century life
Download or read book Modernist Short Fiction by Women written by Dr Claire Drewery and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking on the neglected issue of the short story's relationship to literary Modernism, Claire Drewery examines works by Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf. Drewery argues that the short story as a genre is preoccupied with transgressing boundaries, and thus offers an ideal platform from which to examine the Modernist fascination with the liminal. Embodying both liberation and restriction, liminal spaces on the one hand enable challenges to traditional cultural and personal identities, while on the other hand they entail the inevitable negative consequences of occupying the position of the outsider: marginality, psychosis, and death. Mansfield, Richardson, Sinclair, and Woolf all exploit this paradox in their short fiction, which typically explores literal and psychological borderline states that are resistant to rational analysis. Thus, their short stories offered these authors an opportunity to represent the borders of unconsciousness and to articulate meaning while also conveying a sense of that which is unsayable. Through their concern with liminality, Drewery shows, these writers contribute significantly to the Modernist aesthetic that interrogates identity, the construction of the self, and the relationship between the individual and society.
Download or read book The Hong Kong Modernism of Leung Ping kwan written by C. T. Au and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book resolves around the fundamental question, “What is Hong Kong modernism?” To address this issue, C.T. Au identifies three significant characteristics: a renewal of traditions, an obsession with ordinary things, and an expression of concerns about social and political issues, shared among Western modernisms, Chinese modernism in the 1940s, and such Hong Kong modernists as Ma Lang, Liu Yichang, and Leung Ping-kwan (Yasi/Ye Si). This research concentrates on an examination of the major modernist tenets embodied in Leung’s literary works. Leung Ping-kwan is one of the most prominent and widely read Hong Kong modernist writers; however, there exist only a few scholarly works which focus on the direct relationship between Leung’s works and modernisms. The author argues that Leung paid special attention to issues regarding tradition, daily life, and colonial culture in order to understand his past, his identity, and the unique features of Hong Kong modernism, which celebrate multiple perspectives and inclusiveness. This study not only helps differentiate Hong Kong modernism from other modernisms—positioning the former as a variant of the latter—but also provides a response to the problems evoked by Hong Kong’s colonial milieu.
