A01=James Reath
affect theory
anexact
Author_James Reath
avant-garde
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
complexity
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
everyday aesthetics
James Joyce
mid-century
modernism
new formalism
new materialism
post-modernism
post-structuralism
precision
process-oriented philosophy
Product details
- ISBN 9781399547499
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Jul 2025
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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What happens to form in a time of random walks and Uncertainty Principles, self-organising plasma membranes and multivalent logics? And how might we better categorise the modernist avant-garde's confrontation with such complex and contradictory formalisms? Anexact Form and Modernist Culture presents a soft taxonomy of the long mid-century avant-garde's fuzzy, grey, and viscous forms while investigating the aesthetic and affective valences of that which is 'essentially and not accidentally inexact', as Edmund Husserl writes in Ideas I (1913). Across five chapters on doodles and inkblots; iridescent surfaces and the noise of becoming; the erratic cultural life of precision; the mesomorphic imagination of protoplasm; and the groovy aesthetics of industrial chemistry Anexact Form and Modernist Culture offers a unique examination of avant-garde art and literature in a time of unprecedented err, smudge, ooze and wriggle.
James Reath is a Wellcome Trust Early Career Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Exeter (2023-2027). He received his PhD in English Literature from University College London (UCL) in 2022 and has held visiting fellowships at Yale University (2021) and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin (2022).
