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This chapter focuses on Loy's ambivalent and subtle understanding of the processes underpinning the creation of the economic and symbolic value of artworks, or the economic and cultural processes validating and sustaining their privileged status. Drawing on modernist aesthetics, critical theory and thing theory, the chapter examines early and later texts in dialogue with works by Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, Marcel Duchamp, Ezra Pound and Walter Benjamin, and shows how Loy proposes a dialogic version of the art work as encounter, collaboration, or event, rather than as a self-contained masterpiece. In this chapter the author analyses the notion of artistic creation as labor, investigates the status of Loy’s poetic objects in relation to the world of commerce and of commodities, and explores Loy’s critical assessment of the author’s signature within the “culture industry”.

This chapter suggests that the poetics of T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein may be seen as two sides of the same coin. It begins by examining that coin itself, which is the Modernist aesthetic, shared by Eliot and Stein, even as it was shared by Pound and Joyce, and the other central figures of the period.

The introduction offers a brief outline of standard and more recent scholarship on Loy and her reception; it introduces the concept of “critical modernism,” on the basis of fundamental works dedicated to the theory of the avant-garde, and argues that Loy’s highly diverse corpus of works adheres to well-known protocols of avant-garde and modernist aesthetics, but simultaneously questions them. The chapter also offers a brief summary of the book’s argument and of the single chapters; it outlines the tension in Loy’s corpus between an affirmative early modernist aesthetic, and a critical stance which destabilizes the categories of artwork, artist and art, relating this tension to a broader critique of normative notions of gender, identity and subjectivity.

This chapter shows how the Irish Arts and Crafts movement introduced a bold new aesthetic in the visual arts that scandalised orthodox opinion. The early years of the twentieth century saw a renewed focus on the applied arts – including metalwork, stained glass, tapestries, and printed materials – designed and made for Catholic churches, state buildings, even domestic patrons. Such art reflected existing tensions between conservatism and innovation, by turns echoing and challenging competing cultural nationalist views. The work of Harry Clarke, Evie Hone, the Cuala Press, and others combined traditional materials, skills, and Irish symbolism with innovative aesthetics and sometimes shocking or offensive scenes of modern Irish life. Though church and state institutions that had briefly supported such cultural nationalist work ultimately came to view it as heretical, the chapter demonstrates the profound influence of such work on Irish visual arts modernism.

Friedrich Nietzsche, together with Mallarmé, provided one of the major sources of inspiration for the relationship between literature and dance in the modern period. But whereas Mallarmé's symbolist reading ultimately resides in the beauty and elegance of the dancing figure, an opposing aesthetic polarity arises from the more earthy, agonistic style of Nietzsche's ‘Dionysian’. This chapter shows how Nietzsche's rediscovery of the Dionysian, through his exploration of classical drama, constituted a major influence on the aesthetics of modern dance and literature. Moreover, the tension between Dionysian and Apollonian modes, present in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, is illustrated by the aesthetic struggles of literary and choreographic experimentalism in the texts of J. M. Synge's prose, Yeats's drama, and through the experimental choreography, including Greek dance and the work of Isadora Duncan in Europe and innovators in the USA. Using the example of George Balanchine's landmark ballet Apollo, the chapter concludes by showing how modernism encountered the recovery of the harmony and rationality of the Apollonian in the twentieth century.

Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) is frequently described as a maverick whose unconventional, improvisatory movement aesthetic helped to establish and shape American modern dance. Yet Duncan’s dances and conceptions of art were heavily influenced by Richard Wagner. Dancing to excerpts of Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde, quoting and referencing his artistic theories in her own speech “The Dance of the Future,” and relating tales of her summer at Bayreuth, Duncan staged an intermedial interrogation of Wagner’s works and ideas. The American Wagner cult has long been associated with the Gilded Age and conductor Anton Seidl (1850–1898). Isadora Duncan’s American performances demonstrate that American Wagnerism persisted well into the twentieth-century, albeit in a different form. Conjuring herself as a rebellious disciple of Wagner, Duncan’s intermedial performances knit together music and dance, but also join strands of Wagnerism and Victorian ideologies with early modernist aesthetics.

This essay considers how Virginia Woolf’s feminist critique in her first novel is linked to a negative feminism and a modernist aesthetic of failure. Woolf’s Rachel Vinrace enacts a form of shadow feminism, grounded in refusal, failing, and passivity. Because readings of Woolf’s corpus overlook shadow feminism and tend to explain away the non-triumphant Rachel Vinrace by turning to Woolf’s later successful female characters, this essay discusses The Voyage Out in its own right to highlight how reading Woolf through a positivist feminist lens obscures shadow feminism. This essay argues such readings narrow the scope of feminist inquiry.

This chapter focuses on Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), a famous painter and fashion and costume designer who dressed such movie stars and celebrities as Gloria Swanson, Nancy Cunard, and Alma Gropius. Inspired by the 1909 costumes designed by Léon Bakst for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, and reacting against Art Nouveau’s excessive reliance on flowers and plants for every type of decoration, Delaunay transported modernist aesthetics onto the body through a fashion. With dresses that featured a straight neckline, little complicated seaming, and no waistline, she gave enormous importance to color, which she believed determined the rhythms of the geometrically patterned textiles that she designed.

This chapter discusses the histories of two Welsh magazines which ran from 1937 to 1939: Wales and The Welsh Review. Both magazines had an enormous impact on the development of Welsh writing in English and, in parallel, on the development of a large number of talented Welsh writers in English. Both motivated the uses of a thirties modernist aesthetics mainly in poetry, drawing on T. S. Eliot and Auden, but also at times in prose. In both genres, modernist techniques and ideas were deployed to relate to a particularly Welsh context, with textual fragmentation and modern urban/pastoral contrasts often pointing to a specific cultural and colonial experience.

There is nothing heroic or redemptive about Harry Bloch’s literary art: a former lover whose erotic experience with him Harry has plumbed for his latest novel calls him a “black magician” and his sister characterizes him as “having no center” and “betting everything on physics and pussy.” Allen knew viewers would identify Harry with the bad-Woody of the scandal, and, perhaps for that reason, he has the reprobate fiction writer saved by his art. His writer’s block lifts when, inspired by a dream of an honoring ceremony his characters hold for him, he imagines crafting a story about someone like himself—“a guy who can’t function well in life, but can only function in art.” In his twenty-seventh film, Allen finally dramatized the Modernist affirmation of art as an antidote to life’s confusions, but what his characters have actually redeemed him from is his life—they’ve restored him to the fun-bereft, insularly narcissistic world of his artistic fantasizing, to his barren, antisocial, and loveless world of fiction.

Chapter 4, “Enacting Experimental Psychosis,” looks at model psychosis research through the eyes of a test subject: a theater director drawing an analogy between the performative character of the experiment in which he participated and the break with representation in modernist aesthetics. Reflecting on the seeming incommensurability of interpreting hallucinogen-induced experiences as either mystical or psychotic, this chapter demonstrates historically and ethnographically that the pragmatist framing of the hallucinogen model of psychosis and the fact that it is rooted in the same historical matrix as experimental mysticism enable contemporary researchers to operate with both paradigms without getting caught up in insurmountable contradictions.

Allen’s conflicted attitudes toward the aesthetic are very much on display in this 1996 comedy/drama. David Shayne is a playwright who believes that his art prevails over all other theatrical considerations: he writes pretentious plays with ponderous O’Neill-esque titles and expects Broadway producers to uncritically fund them. When the actual producer of his drama saddles him with a talentless actress whose Mafia boyfriend predicates his contribution on her having a role, Shayne meets Cheech, a gangster with a much better-developed, intuitive sense of dramatic structure than the playwright has. (“Poetic license, bullshit,” Cheech tells Shayne, offering a sentiment that Allen clearly endorses, “People believe what they see when the actors sound real.”) By the film’s conclusion, Shayne’s experience with Broadway and Cheech have led him to affirm, “There, I’ve said it and I feel free. I’m not an artist.” Shayne’s negation presages Allen’s insistence in some subsequent interviews that he is not an artist but a working filmmaker.

Close reading, as it gained prestige from the 1920s in Cambridge Practical Criticism and then the American New Criticism, was not only a product of the modernist period but a product of modernism. Whatever else modernism involved, it advocated what we might call ‘close writing’: a minute attention to the words being used, the word choices being justified by the effects they produced. When I. A. Richards distributed anonymized poems to his students and colleagues for them to analyse, and then analysed their responses in turn, he wrote up his findings in the book that effectively launched close reading as an academic practice, Practical Criticism (1929). This chapter investigates two kinds of context for the attention to close reading exemplified by Richards. One is the network of writers and thinkers around Richards; the other is literary modernism itself

This work is the result of a decade of researching and writing about the correlation between the postmodern approach to the Holocaust, the place of Jews in deconstruction and literary theory (the Jew as trope or figure), the fallout of the Arab-Israeli conflict in France, and the resurgence of antisemitism. So far, no book has aimed at tracing the metaphysical, literary, and esthetic roots of French responses to this new manifestation of antisemitism. I do not advocate a clear-cut division between “new” and “old” antisemitism, or even a radical paradigm shift. Instead, I wish to bring into focus the mutual shaping of past and present in our understanding of responses to the resurgence of antisemitism. My contention is that French reactions even to the most lethal incarnations of antisemitism can only be understood if we consider (a) the French construction of the “figural Jew” and the deconstruction of the empirical (political and historical) Jew; (b) the French way of memorializing, estheticizing, and idealizing the Holocaust within the last forty-five years; (c) France's vexed relation to its colonial past; and (d) the modernist French aesthetic grounded in the celebration of anomie and transgression.