David Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450235
- eISBN:
- 9780801460975
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450235.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This book sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite ...
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This book sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left–right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the anti-modern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. This book argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.Less
This book sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left–right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the anti-modern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. This book argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.
Margery Palmer McCulloch
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748634743
- eISBN:
- 9780748651900
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748634743.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the ...
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This book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the intellectual and artistic ideas of European modernism as well as responding to the challenges of the Scottish cultural and political context. Topics range from the revitalisation of the Scots vernacular as an avant-garde literary language in the 1920s and the interaction of literature and politics in the 1930s to the fictional re-imagining of the Highlands, the response of women writers to a changing modern world and the manifestations of a late modernism in the 1940s and 1950s. Writers featured include Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Catherine Carswell, Naomi Mitchison, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Sorley MacLean.Less
This book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the intellectual and artistic ideas of European modernism as well as responding to the challenges of the Scottish cultural and political context. Topics range from the revitalisation of the Scots vernacular as an avant-garde literary language in the 1920s and the interaction of literature and politics in the 1930s to the fictional re-imagining of the Highlands, the response of women writers to a changing modern world and the manifestations of a late modernism in the 1940s and 1950s. Writers featured include Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Catherine Carswell, Naomi Mitchison, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Sorley MacLean.
David Clarke
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9789888083060
- eISBN:
- 9789882209794
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888083060.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
Linear stories of modern art's development have characteristically been formalistic ones, and although such narratives have not always treated abstraction as essential to artistic progress, they have ...
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Linear stories of modern art's development have characteristically been formalistic ones, and although such narratives have not always treated abstraction as essential to artistic progress, they have generally given art that is abstract a central role to play. In particular, abstract art proved crucial to narratives that construct postwar American modernism as the inheritor of earlier twentieth-century European modernism, and which serve to ratify American artistic hegemony. This chapter proposes to take one small step towards widening the focus by examining abstraction from the perspective of Chinese art. To take such a deliberately oblique perspective on abstract art's history, it hopes to lay bare some of the cultural closures that are often found in discussions of artistic modernity, and offers a more globalized perspective than is frequently the case.Less
Linear stories of modern art's development have characteristically been formalistic ones, and although such narratives have not always treated abstraction as essential to artistic progress, they have generally given art that is abstract a central role to play. In particular, abstract art proved crucial to narratives that construct postwar American modernism as the inheritor of earlier twentieth-century European modernism, and which serve to ratify American artistic hegemony. This chapter proposes to take one small step towards widening the focus by examining abstraction from the perspective of Chinese art. To take such a deliberately oblique perspective on abstract art's history, it hopes to lay bare some of the cultural closures that are often found in discussions of artistic modernity, and offers a more globalized perspective than is frequently the case.
Leonardo Lisi
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245321
- eISBN:
- 9780823252541
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245321.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book argues that two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have been inherited from the late 18th century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the ...
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This book argues that two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have been inherited from the late 18th century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the aesthetics of autonomy, associated with the self-sufficient work of art, and the aesthetics of fragmentation, practiced by the avant-gardes. Yet both of these models rest on assumptions about the nature of truth and existence that cannot be treated as exhaustive of modernist form. The present book accordingly traces an alternative aesthetics of dependency that provides a different formal structure, philosophical foundation, and historical condition for modernist texts. Taking Europe's Scandinavian periphery as its point of departure, the book examines how Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen imagined a response to the changing conditions of modernity different from those at the European core, one that subsequently influenced Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce. Combining close readings with a broader revision of the nature and genealogy of modernism, Marginal Modernity challenges what we understand by modernist aesthetics, their origins, and their implications for how we conceive of our relation to the modern world.Less
This book argues that two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have been inherited from the late 18th century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the aesthetics of autonomy, associated with the self-sufficient work of art, and the aesthetics of fragmentation, practiced by the avant-gardes. Yet both of these models rest on assumptions about the nature of truth and existence that cannot be treated as exhaustive of modernist form. The present book accordingly traces an alternative aesthetics of dependency that provides a different formal structure, philosophical foundation, and historical condition for modernist texts. Taking Europe's Scandinavian periphery as its point of departure, the book examines how Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen imagined a response to the changing conditions of modernity different from those at the European core, one that subsequently influenced Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce. Combining close readings with a broader revision of the nature and genealogy of modernism, Marginal Modernity challenges what we understand by modernist aesthetics, their origins, and their implications for how we conceive of our relation to the modern world.
David Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450235
- eISBN:
- 9780801460975
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450235.003.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This introductory chapter sets out the book’s purpose, namely to attempt an overview of the theory and history of the total work in European art since the French Revolution. This is perhaps the first ...
More
This introductory chapter sets out the book’s purpose, namely to attempt an overview of the theory and history of the total work in European art since the French Revolution. This is perhaps the first book in English to treat the total work of art as a key concept in aesthetic modernism. It argues for twin lineages of the total work—a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic—which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s on. This critical period from the turn of the century to the 1930s forms the central focus of the present study. These key years of the European avant-garde are explored from two closely related perspectives: the meta-aesthetic and the metapolitical. The remainder of the chapter sketches the framework of the present inquiry; provides the definition of the total work that underpins this study; followed by an outline of the subsequent chapters.Less
This introductory chapter sets out the book’s purpose, namely to attempt an overview of the theory and history of the total work in European art since the French Revolution. This is perhaps the first book in English to treat the total work of art as a key concept in aesthetic modernism. It argues for twin lineages of the total work—a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic—which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s on. This critical period from the turn of the century to the 1930s forms the central focus of the present study. These key years of the European avant-garde are explored from two closely related perspectives: the meta-aesthetic and the metapolitical. The remainder of the chapter sketches the framework of the present inquiry; provides the definition of the total work that underpins this study; followed by an outline of the subsequent chapters.
Leonardo F. Lisi
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245321
- eISBN:
- 9780823252541
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245321.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The Introduction argues that aesthetic analysis of literary works is concerned with the organization of form and content components of a work as a whole rather than those components themselves. It ...
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The Introduction argues that aesthetic analysis of literary works is concerned with the organization of form and content components of a work as a whole rather than those components themselves. It furthermore shows that two ways of understanding modernist aesthetics in this sense dominate the contemporary scholarship: the aesthetics of autonomy, associated with the self-sufficient work of art, and the aesthetics of fragmentation, practiced by the avant-gardes. Insofar as aesthetic structures are responses to historical and artistic transformations, however, these two models cannot be treated as exhaustive of modernist form. The Introduction lays the ground for tracing a different aesthetic structure, one developed at the periphery of European culture, in Scandinavia, rather than at its core. This alternative aesthetic structure formulates the principle according to which a work must be organized in terms incompatible with that work's own representational and thematic structures, thereby making the purposeful relation of its parts depend on an interpretative perspective not coextensive with the logic of those parts themselves.Less
The Introduction argues that aesthetic analysis of literary works is concerned with the organization of form and content components of a work as a whole rather than those components themselves. It furthermore shows that two ways of understanding modernist aesthetics in this sense dominate the contemporary scholarship: the aesthetics of autonomy, associated with the self-sufficient work of art, and the aesthetics of fragmentation, practiced by the avant-gardes. Insofar as aesthetic structures are responses to historical and artistic transformations, however, these two models cannot be treated as exhaustive of modernist form. The Introduction lays the ground for tracing a different aesthetic structure, one developed at the periphery of European culture, in Scandinavia, rather than at its core. This alternative aesthetic structure formulates the principle according to which a work must be organized in terms incompatible with that work's own representational and thematic structures, thereby making the purposeful relation of its parts depend on an interpretative perspective not coextensive with the logic of those parts themselves.
Neil Levi
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823255061
- eISBN:
- 9780823260867
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823255061.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
From the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, if not beyond, certain works of European modernist art, literature, and music that were neither by nor about Jews have ...
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From the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, if not beyond, certain works of European modernist art, literature, and music that were neither by nor about Jews have nevertheless been interpreted as somehow Jewish, or, more precisely, Jewified. This book argues that these strange interpretations, although hostile toward and often deliberately incomprehending of their object, need to be treated as integral to the history of European modernism. To grasp why, it suggests we turn our attention away from the dominant scholarly preoccupation with abject Jewish bodies and toward the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, contagious Jewish spirit, a spirit identified both with modernity and regression to an ancient past. The book tracks how this fantasy unfolds in the antimodernist polemics of Richard Wagner, Max Nordau, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, reaching its apotheosis in the notorious 1937 Nazi exhibition of “Degenerate Art,” and then turns to James Joyce, Theodor Adorno, and Samuel Beckett, offering radical new interpretations of these modernist authors to show how each presents his own poetics as a self-conscious departure from the modern antisemitic imaginary.Less
From the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, if not beyond, certain works of European modernist art, literature, and music that were neither by nor about Jews have nevertheless been interpreted as somehow Jewish, or, more precisely, Jewified. This book argues that these strange interpretations, although hostile toward and often deliberately incomprehending of their object, need to be treated as integral to the history of European modernism. To grasp why, it suggests we turn our attention away from the dominant scholarly preoccupation with abject Jewish bodies and toward the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, contagious Jewish spirit, a spirit identified both with modernity and regression to an ancient past. The book tracks how this fantasy unfolds in the antimodernist polemics of Richard Wagner, Max Nordau, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, reaching its apotheosis in the notorious 1937 Nazi exhibition of “Degenerate Art,” and then turns to James Joyce, Theodor Adorno, and Samuel Beckett, offering radical new interpretations of these modernist authors to show how each presents his own poetics as a self-conscious departure from the modern antisemitic imaginary.
James Loeffler
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300137132
- eISBN:
- 9780300162943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300137132.003.0006
- Subject:
- Music, Psychology of Music
This chapter examines how Russian Jewish culture began to unravel from within as early as the first years of World War I, beginning with a now classic ideological debate over the very Jewishness of ...
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This chapter examines how Russian Jewish culture began to unravel from within as early as the first years of World War I, beginning with a now classic ideological debate over the very Jewishness of Jewish music. It analyzes how the complicated fate of Russian Jewish culture reflected the multiple legacies and divergent experiences of Jews in interwar Soviet Russia, Mandatory Palestine, and the United States. The chapter also suggests that the resurgence of Jewish politics coupled with the broader aesthetic challenge of European modernism that led to the decisive breakdown of the Jewish cultural movement.Less
This chapter examines how Russian Jewish culture began to unravel from within as early as the first years of World War I, beginning with a now classic ideological debate over the very Jewishness of Jewish music. It analyzes how the complicated fate of Russian Jewish culture reflected the multiple legacies and divergent experiences of Jews in interwar Soviet Russia, Mandatory Palestine, and the United States. The chapter also suggests that the resurgence of Jewish politics coupled with the broader aesthetic challenge of European modernism that led to the decisive breakdown of the Jewish cultural movement.
Neil Levi
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823255061
- eISBN:
- 9780823260867
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823255061.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to show that what is referred to as the anti-Semitic interpretation of modernist form should be regarded as integral to the history of ...
More
This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to show that what is referred to as the anti-Semitic interpretation of modernist form should be regarded as integral to the history of European modernism. It examines the ways in which the anti-Semitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, pervasive, contagious Jewish spirit—the myth of Jewification or Judaization—shaped both the interpretation and creation of modernist form. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less
This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to show that what is referred to as the anti-Semitic interpretation of modernist form should be regarded as integral to the history of European modernism. It examines the ways in which the anti-Semitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, pervasive, contagious Jewish spirit—the myth of Jewification or Judaization—shaped both the interpretation and creation of modernist form. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
Robert Hampson and Will Montgomery (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846312311
- eISBN:
- 9781846316067
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846316067
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Frank O'Hara's writing is central to any consideration of twentieth-century American poetry. This book asks why O'Hara remains so important to twenty-first-century readers and writers of poetry. The ...
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Frank O'Hara's writing is central to any consideration of twentieth-century American poetry. This book asks why O'Hara remains so important to twenty-first-century readers and writers of poetry. The book is transatlantic in tone, combining American scholarship with a wide sampling of British writers. For many, O'Hara's distinctive appeal depends on his witty depictions of urban experience, his relationship to the painters of Abstract Expressionism and the exhilarating immediacy of his poetic voice. Yet these chatty and approachable qualities coexist with a testing engagement with currents in European and American modernism. This book offers a comprehensive picture of the poet, presenting the conversational insouciance of the writing alongside its more intransigent features.Less
Frank O'Hara's writing is central to any consideration of twentieth-century American poetry. This book asks why O'Hara remains so important to twenty-first-century readers and writers of poetry. The book is transatlantic in tone, combining American scholarship with a wide sampling of British writers. For many, O'Hara's distinctive appeal depends on his witty depictions of urban experience, his relationship to the painters of Abstract Expressionism and the exhilarating immediacy of his poetic voice. Yet these chatty and approachable qualities coexist with a testing engagement with currents in European and American modernism. This book offers a comprehensive picture of the poet, presenting the conversational insouciance of the writing alongside its more intransigent features.
Seth Brodsky
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780520279360
- eISBN:
- 9780520966505
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520279360.003.0016
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This chapter returns to the book's own present, but drags fi-de-siècle Vienna with it, exploring a network of “Mahler pieces” from 1989. The network emerges partly out of unrelated, stylistically ...
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This chapter returns to the book's own present, but drags fi-de-siècle Vienna with it, exploring a network of “Mahler pieces” from 1989. The network emerges partly out of unrelated, stylistically disparate works, some of which explicitly cite or allude to the composer, others of which stage Mahlerian scenes or tropes. But the bulk of the network is the result of deliberate effort—European cultural institutions commissioning composers to fantasize on their behalf, to produce collective scenes in which “Mahler” serves as a musical representative of “Europe.” Unsurprisingly, the composers respond in the negative—not with scenes, but with their dismantling; not with representations, but their travesty, ruin, or residue. The remainder of the chapter stumbles into the book's central repression: the presence of Theodor Adorno, whose 1960 monograph on Mahler is taken as an uncanny guide to these later works. The book ends with an extended consideration of Adorno's place in a Lacanian account of European musical modernism.Less
This chapter returns to the book's own present, but drags fi-de-siècle Vienna with it, exploring a network of “Mahler pieces” from 1989. The network emerges partly out of unrelated, stylistically disparate works, some of which explicitly cite or allude to the composer, others of which stage Mahlerian scenes or tropes. But the bulk of the network is the result of deliberate effort—European cultural institutions commissioning composers to fantasize on their behalf, to produce collective scenes in which “Mahler” serves as a musical representative of “Europe.” Unsurprisingly, the composers respond in the negative—not with scenes, but with their dismantling; not with representations, but their travesty, ruin, or residue. The remainder of the chapter stumbles into the book's central repression: the presence of Theodor Adorno, whose 1960 monograph on Mahler is taken as an uncanny guide to these later works. The book ends with an extended consideration of Adorno's place in a Lacanian account of European musical modernism.
Sascha Bru
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748639250
- eISBN:
- 9780748651931
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748639250.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book looks at the ties between European modernism and democracy in a cross-cultural manner. Focusing on the continental avant-gardes of the nineteen-tens and twenties, it fundamentally revises ...
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This book looks at the ties between European modernism and democracy in a cross-cultural manner. Focusing on the continental avant-gardes of the nineteen-tens and twenties, it fundamentally revises our understanding of modernism's cultural and political history. The book brings together a wide range of European experimental writers and provides detailed analyses of Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti, German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck and Belgian expressionist Paul van Ostaijen. It locates these writers within their exceptional democratic context and demonstrates how the modernist avant-garde, during the First World War and the upheavals that followed, found itself caught up in a series of ‘states of exception’. In such states, legal democratic institutions were bracketed and set aside, and ‘literature’ as an autonomous realm was temporarily suspended. Faced with extreme forms of politicisation, avant-gardists throughout Europe tried to safeguard literature's autonomy in a variety of ways. These included turning politics and law into genuinely artistic materials and producing a repertoire of alternatives to existent frameworks of democracy. Against assertions that anti-art avant-garde gestures were meant to overcome art's autonomy and approximate the condition of politics, the book shows that European avant-gardists may well have been some of the staunchest defenders of art's sovereignty in modern times.Less
This book looks at the ties between European modernism and democracy in a cross-cultural manner. Focusing on the continental avant-gardes of the nineteen-tens and twenties, it fundamentally revises our understanding of modernism's cultural and political history. The book brings together a wide range of European experimental writers and provides detailed analyses of Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti, German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck and Belgian expressionist Paul van Ostaijen. It locates these writers within their exceptional democratic context and demonstrates how the modernist avant-garde, during the First World War and the upheavals that followed, found itself caught up in a series of ‘states of exception’. In such states, legal democratic institutions were bracketed and set aside, and ‘literature’ as an autonomous realm was temporarily suspended. Faced with extreme forms of politicisation, avant-gardists throughout Europe tried to safeguard literature's autonomy in a variety of ways. These included turning politics and law into genuinely artistic materials and producing a repertoire of alternatives to existent frameworks of democracy. Against assertions that anti-art avant-garde gestures were meant to overcome art's autonomy and approximate the condition of politics, the book shows that European avant-gardists may well have been some of the staunchest defenders of art's sovereignty in modern times.
Des O'Rawe
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719099663
- eISBN:
- 9781526104137
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719099663.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Regarding the real: cinema, documentary, and the visual arts develops an approach to the study of documentary film focussing on its aesthetic and cultural relations to the modern visual arts, ...
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Regarding the real: cinema, documentary, and the visual arts develops an approach to the study of documentary film focussing on its aesthetic and cultural relations to the modern visual arts, especially: animation, assemblage, photography, painting, and architecture. In particular, it examines how documentary practices have often incorporated methods and expressive techniques derived from these art forms. Combining close analysis with cultural history, the book re-assesses the influence of the modern visual arts in subverting the structures of realism typically associated with documentary film, and considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative, and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary remains an open form, an unstable expressive phenomenon that at its best interrogates its own narratives, and intentions. In the course of its discussion, the book charts a path that leads from Len Lye to Hiroshi Teshigahara, and includes along the way figures such as Joseph Cornell, Johan van der Keuken, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas, Raymond Depardon.Less
Regarding the real: cinema, documentary, and the visual arts develops an approach to the study of documentary film focussing on its aesthetic and cultural relations to the modern visual arts, especially: animation, assemblage, photography, painting, and architecture. In particular, it examines how documentary practices have often incorporated methods and expressive techniques derived from these art forms. Combining close analysis with cultural history, the book re-assesses the influence of the modern visual arts in subverting the structures of realism typically associated with documentary film, and considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative, and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary remains an open form, an unstable expressive phenomenon that at its best interrogates its own narratives, and intentions. In the course of its discussion, the book charts a path that leads from Len Lye to Hiroshi Teshigahara, and includes along the way figures such as Joseph Cornell, Johan van der Keuken, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas, Raymond Depardon.
Boris Gasparov
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300106503
- eISBN:
- 9780300133165
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300106503.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This chapter examines Modest Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov. It discusses how the opera became a tangible presence in the culture of European modernism. It also explains that it took time for ...
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This chapter examines Modest Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov. It discusses how the opera became a tangible presence in the culture of European modernism. It also explains that it took time for Mussorgsky's innovative dramatic design to be adapted in Western theater and it was Giacomo Puccini's Turandot that introduced a Musorgskian unruly crowd to the Western musical drama.Less
This chapter examines Modest Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov. It discusses how the opera became a tangible presence in the culture of European modernism. It also explains that it took time for Mussorgsky's innovative dramatic design to be adapted in Western theater and it was Giacomo Puccini's Turandot that introduced a Musorgskian unruly crowd to the Western musical drama.
Rob Stone
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231165532
- eISBN:
- 9780231850407
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231165532.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter argues that it would be wisest to posit the cinema of Richard Linklater as the cinematic bridge between European Modernism and American Postmodernism—the “little space in between” Godard ...
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This chapter argues that it would be wisest to posit the cinema of Richard Linklater as the cinematic bridge between European Modernism and American Postmodernism—the “little space in between” Godard and Tarantino. Yet the collaborative, cooperative working practice that renders communities and couples onscreen is rather particular to Linklater, whose way of exploring limited time-frames by limited means results in films in which “somehow it all feels true and accurate in a composite sort of way”. Because Linklater is prompted to make his financial and creative limitations as part of his craft, his cinema often reflects the experience of a specific time from all sides. Although none of them are nostalgic, they are all fleeting, immanent, transient, and ephemeral. Any leaning towards nostalgia is curtailed by meaninglessness in Waking Life (2001), and by madness in A Scanner Darkly (2006).Less
This chapter argues that it would be wisest to posit the cinema of Richard Linklater as the cinematic bridge between European Modernism and American Postmodernism—the “little space in between” Godard and Tarantino. Yet the collaborative, cooperative working practice that renders communities and couples onscreen is rather particular to Linklater, whose way of exploring limited time-frames by limited means results in films in which “somehow it all feels true and accurate in a composite sort of way”. Because Linklater is prompted to make his financial and creative limitations as part of his craft, his cinema often reflects the experience of a specific time from all sides. Although none of them are nostalgic, they are all fleeting, immanent, transient, and ephemeral. Any leaning towards nostalgia is curtailed by meaninglessness in Waking Life (2001), and by madness in A Scanner Darkly (2006).
Jaroslaw Anders (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300111675
- eISBN:
- 9780300155310
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300111675.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter describes the life and works of Polish writer Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. His book Insatiability is considered one of the classics of European modernism. Witkiewicz has remained a ...
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This chapter describes the life and works of Polish writer Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. His book Insatiability is considered one of the classics of European modernism. Witkiewicz has remained a mystery to interpreters of his writing and his life. Was he a “metaphysical dandy” and an epigone of nineteenth-century decadence? Or a forerunner of today's radical irony? Or was he, like the hero of Insatiability, a lunatic slowly sinking into incoherence?Less
This chapter describes the life and works of Polish writer Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. His book Insatiability is considered one of the classics of European modernism. Witkiewicz has remained a mystery to interpreters of his writing and his life. Was he a “metaphysical dandy” and an epigone of nineteenth-century decadence? Or a forerunner of today's radical irony? Or was he, like the hero of Insatiability, a lunatic slowly sinking into incoherence?
Danielle Shapiro
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780816693405
- eISBN:
- 9781452954318
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816693405.003.0004
- Subject:
- Art, Design
This chapter examines Vassos’s interior design practices and links them to ideas about the home as a machine. Starting in the late 1920s, Vassos developed modular geometric electronic units that ...
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This chapter examines Vassos’s interior design practices and links them to ideas about the home as a machine. Starting in the late 1920s, Vassos developed modular geometric electronic units that consolidated the entertainment features of the living room. His designs for the home morphed European modernism with American eclecticism, edging towards Bauhaus-style modularity.Less
This chapter examines Vassos’s interior design practices and links them to ideas about the home as a machine. Starting in the late 1920s, Vassos developed modular geometric electronic units that consolidated the entertainment features of the living room. His designs for the home morphed European modernism with American eclecticism, edging towards Bauhaus-style modularity.
