Modernism, Technology, and the Body

Modernism, Technology, and the Body PDF

Author: Tim Armstrong

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-02-28

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780521599979

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This book is a study of the relations between the body and its technologies in modernism. Tim Armstrong traces the links between modernist literary texts and medical, psychological and social theory across a range of writers, including Yeats, Henry James, Eliot, Stein, and Pound. Armstrong shows how modernist texts enact experimental procedures which have their origins in nineteenth-century psychophysics, biology, and bodily reform techniques, but within a context in which the body is reconceived and subjected to new modes of production, representation and commodification. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, Armstrong challenges the received oppositions between technology and literature, the instrumental and the aesthetic, by demonstrating the leaky boundaries and complex interconnections between these domains. This book offers a cultural history of modernism as it negotiated the enduring fact of the human body in a period of rapid technological change.

The Senses of Modernism

The Senses of Modernism PDF

Author: Sara Danius

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-01-24

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 150172116X

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In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius develops a radically new theoretical and historical understanding of high modernism. The author closely analyzes Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and James Joyce's Ulysses as narratives of the sweeping changes that affected high and low culture in the age of technological reproduction. In her discussion of the years from 1880 to 1930, Danius proposes that the high-modernist aesthetic is inseparable from a technologically mediated crisis of the senses. She reveals the ways in which categories of perceiving and knowing are realigned when technological devices are capable of reproducing sense data. Sparked by innovations such as chronophotography, phonography, radiography, cinematography, and technologies of speed, this sudden shift in perceptual abilities had an effect on all arts of the time.Danius explores how perception, notably sight and hearing, is staged in the three most significant modern novels in German, French, and British literature. The Senses of Modernism connects technological change and formal innovation to transform the study of modernist aesthetics. Danius questions the longstanding acceptance of a binary relationship between high and low culture and describes the complicated relationship between modernism and technology, challenging the conceptual divide between a technological culture and a more properly aesthetic one.

Modernism

Modernism PDF

Author: Tim Armstrong

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2005-06-17

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 0745629830

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This volume combines a clear overview for those with no prior knowledge or experience of modernism with a subtle argument that will appeal to higher level undergraduates and scholars.

Modernism, Science, and Technology

Modernism, Science, and Technology PDF

Author: Mark S. Morrisson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-11-17

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1474233430

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From quantum physics and genetics to psychology and the social sciences, from the development of atomic weapons to the growing mass media of film and radio, the early 20th century was a period of intense scientific and technological change. Modernism, Science, and Technology surveys the scientific contexts of writers from H.G. Wells and Gertrude Stein to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and the ways in modernist writers responded to these paradigm shifts. Introducing key concepts from science studies and their implications for the study of modernist literature, the book includes chapters covering the physical sciences, mathematics, life sciences, social sciences and 'pseudosciences'. Including a timeline of key developments and guides to further reading, this is an essential guide to students and researchers studying the topic at all levels.

Mestizo Modernity

Mestizo Modernity PDF

Author: David S. Dalton

Publisher: University of Florida Press

Published: 2021-11-02

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9781683403104

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This book discusses the work of Josâe Vasconcelos, Diego Rivera, Josâe Clemente Orozco, Emilio "El Indio" Fernâandez, El Santo, and Carlos Olvera. These artists--and many others--held diametrically opposed worldviews and used very different media while producing works during different decades. Nevertheless, each of these artists posited the fusion of the body with technology as key to forming an "authentic," Mexican identity.

Modernism and the Machinery of Madness

Modernism and the Machinery of Madness PDF

Author: Andrew Gaedtke

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-10-26

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1108307663

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Modernism and the Machinery of Madness demonstrates the emergence of a technological form of paranoia within modernist culture which transformed much of the period's experimental fiction. Gaedtke argues that the works of writers such as Samuel Beckett, Anna Kavan, Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and others respond to the collapse of categorical distinctions between human and machine. Modern British and Irish novels represent a convergence between technological models of the mind and new media that were often regarded as 'thought-influencing machines'. Gaedtke shows that this literary paranoia comes into new focus when read in light of twentieth-century memoirs of mental illness. By thinking across the discourses of experimental fiction, mental illness, psychiatry, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind, this book shows the historical and conceptual sources of this confusion as well as the narrative responses. This book contributes to the fields of modernist studies, disability studies, and medical humanities.

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body PDF

Author: Kristina Wilson

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0691213496

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The first investigation of how race and gender shaped the presentation and marketing of Modernist decor in postwar America In the world of interior design, mid-century Modernism has left an indelible mark still seen and felt today in countless open-concept floor plans and spare, geometric furnishings. Yet despite our continued fascination, we rarely consider how this iconic design sensibility was marketed to the diverse audiences of its era. Examining advice manuals, advertisements in Life and Ebony, furniture, art, and more, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body offers a powerful new look at how codes of race, gender, and identity influenced—and were influenced by—Modern design and shaped its presentation to consumers. Taking us to the booming suburban landscape of postwar America, Kristina Wilson demonstrates that the ideals defined by popular Modernist furnishings were far from neutral or race-blind. Advertisers offered this aesthetic to White audiences as a solution for keeping dirt and outsiders at bay, an approach that reinforced middle-class White privilege. By contrast, media arenas such as Ebony magazine presented African American readers with an image of Modernism as a style of comfort, security, and social confidence. Wilson shows how etiquette and home decorating manuals served to control women by associating them with the domestic sphere, and she considers how furniture by George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames, as well as smaller-scale decorative accessories, empowered some users, even while constraining others. A striking counter-narrative to conventional histories of design, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body unveils fresh perspectives on one of the most distinctive movements in American visual culture.

English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950

English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950 PDF

Author: Dr Petra Rau

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-04-28

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1409475417

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This is the first systematic study to trace the way representations of 'Germanness' in modernist British literature from 1890 to 1950 contributed to the development of English identity. Petra Rau examines the shift in attitudes towards Germany and Germans, from suspicious competitiveness in the late Victorian period to the aggressive hostility of the First World War and the curious inconsistencies of the 1930s and 1940s. These shifts were no simple response to political change but the result of an anxious negotiation of modernity in which specific aspects of Englishness were projected onto representations of Germans and Germany in English literature and culture. While this incisive argument clarifies and deepens our understanding of cultural and national politics in the first half of the twentieth century, it also complicates current debates surrounding race and 'otherness' in cultural studies. Authors discussed include major figures such as Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, Ford, Forster and Bowen, as well as popular or less familiar writers such as Saki, Graham Greene, and Stevie Smith. Accessibly written and convincingly argued, Rau's study will not only be an important book for scholars but will serve as a valuable guide to undergraduates working in modernism, literary history, and European cultural relations.

Affective Materialities

Affective Materialities PDF

Author: Kara Watts

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2019-03-04

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0813057078

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Affective Materialities reexamines modernist theorizations of the body and opens up the artistic, political, and ethical possibilities at the intersection of affect theory and ecocriticism, two recent directions in literary studies not typically brought into conversation. Modernist creativity, the volume proposes, may return to us notions of the feeling, material body that contemporary scholarship has lost touch with, bodies that suggest alternative relations to others and to the world. Contributors argue that modernist writers frequently bridge the dichotomy between body and world by portraying bodies that merge with or are re-created by their surroundings into an amalgam of self and place. Chapters focus on this treatment of the body through works by canonical modernists including William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster alongside lesser-studied writers Janet Frame, Herbert Read, and Nella Larsen. Showing the ways the body in literature can be a lens for understanding the fluidities of race, gender, and sexuality, as well as species and subjectivity, this volume maps the connections among modernist aesthetics, histories of the twentieth-century body, and the concerns of modernism that can also speak to urgent concerns of today.

Modernism: Evolution of an Idea

Modernism: Evolution of an Idea PDF

Author: Sean Latham

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-10-22

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1472529154

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What exactly is “modernism”? And how and why has its definition changed over time? Modernism: Evolution of an Idea is the first book to trace the development of the term “modernism” from cultural debates in the early twentieth century to the dynamic contemporary field of modernist studies. Rather than assuming and recounting the contributions of modernism's chief literary and artistic figures, this book focuses on critical formulations and reception through topics such as: - The evolution of “modernism” from a pejorative term in intellectual arguments, through its condemnation by Pope Pius X in 1907, and on to its subsequent centrality to definitions of new art by T. S. Eliot, Laura Riding and Robert Graves, F. R. Leavis, Edmund Wilson, and Clement Greenberg - New Criticism and its legacies in the formation of the modernist canon in anthologies, classrooms, and literary histories - The shifting conceptions of modernism during the rise of gender and race studies, French theory, Marxist criticism, postmodernism, and more - The New Modernist Studies and its contemporary engagements with the politics, institutions, and many cultures of modernism internationally With a glossary of key terms and movements and a capacious critical bibliography, this is an essential survey for students and scholars working in modernist studies at all levels.