Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity
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A01=Jeff Wallace
Abstraction
Aesthetics
Author_Jeff Wallace
Barnett Newman
Category=AGA
Category=DSBH
Category=QDTN
D.H. Lawrence
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Humanism
Inhuman
Modernism
Paul C?zanne
Paul Cezanne
Posthumanism
Product details
- ISBN 9781474461658
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 14 Apr 2023
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Explores abstraction as a keyword in aesthetic modernism and in critical thinking since Marx
Abstraction as the 'missing keyword' in Raymond Williams
The writing of abstraction in Marx and Marxism
Paul C zanne and Barnett Newman compared as writer-artists of abstraction
New readings of abstraction and the inhuman in the experimental writing of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett
A close study of Beckett's 'Proustian equation' and its role in a transformed thinking of abstraction
Abstraction is one of the most important words in modernism and in the critical thought of modernity, yet its complex work is invariably hidden in plain sight. What do we want from abstraction? Does it refer to thought, or to art? Is it a term of reproach, or of affirmation? Beyond these distinctions, Jeff Wallace's new intellectual history of abstraction in modernism and modernity proposes that abstraction is always uniquely concerned with the importance and revaluation of the inhuman in and for the human. Wallace's case studies range across the writings of Raymond Williams and Paul Val ry, Marx and Marxist aesthetics, the discourse on abstract visual art in C zanne, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Newman, the literary experimentalisms of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett, and the twenty-first-century legacies of modernist abstraction in two forms: the post-Deleuzian resurgence of interest in the philosophies of William James, Henri Bergson and A. N. Whitehead; and the act of looking at the abstract canvas in plays by Yasmina Reza, John Logan and Lee Hall. Contrary to habitual associations of abstraction's difficulty with the exclusivity of high modernism, Wallace finds an inclusive and democratic impulse at the heart of the difficulty itself the promise of an abstraction for all.
Jeff Wallace is Professor Emeritus at Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author of Beginning Modernism (Manchester University Press, 2011) and D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Palgrave, 2005) and of a range of writing that explores the relations between literature, science and philosophy from modernism to the contemporary, with an emphasis on theories of humanism, critical posthumanism and the inhuman. He is a specialist in D. H. Lawrence studies and has also co-edited volumes on Gothic Modernisms, Raymond Williams, and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. He is a founding editor of the journal Key Words and currently co-edits the book series New Literary Theory for Routledge.
