Untimely Moderns

Untimely Moderns PDF

Author: Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2023-07-25

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0300263953

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A novel exploration of the idea of nonlinear time and its place at the heart of modern art and architecture Through much of the twentieth century, a diverse group of thinkers engaged in an interdisciplinary conversation about the meaning of time and history for modern art and architecture. The group included architects Louis Kahn, Everett Victor Meeks, James Gamble Rogers, Paul Rudolph, and Eero Saarinen; artists Anni and Josef Albers; philosopher Paul Weiss; and art historians Henri Focillon, George Kubler, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, and Vincent Scully. These figures were unified by their resistance to the idea that, to be considered modern, art and architecture had to be of its time, as well as by the pivotal role that Yale University held as a backdrop to their thinking. These thinkers sponsored a new kind of approach, one that Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen terms "untimely," emphasizing a departure from a sequential course of events. Ideas about temporal duration, new tradition, the presence of the past, and the shape of time were among the concepts they explored. With an interdisciplinary focus, Pelkonen reveals previously unexplored connections among key figures of American intellectual and artistic culture at midcentury whose works and words would shape modern architecture.

Depositions

Depositions PDF

Author: Amy Knight Powell

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2012-10-04

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1935408208

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From late medieval reenactments of the Deposition from the Cross to Sol Lewitt’s “Buried Cube,” Depositions is about taking down images and about images that anticipate being taken down. Foretelling their own depositions, as well as their re-elevations in contexts far from those in which they were made, the images studied in this book reveal themselves to be untimely — no truer to their first appearance than to their later reappearances. In Depositions, Amy Knight Powell makes the case that late medieval paintings and ritual reenactments of the Deposition from the Cross not only picture the deposition of Christ (the imago Dei) but also allegorize the deposition of the image as such and, in so doing, prefigure the lowering of “dead images” during the Protestant Reformation. Late medieval pre-figurations of Reformation iconoclasm anticipate, in turn, the repeated “deaths” of art since the advent of photography: that is the premise of the vignettes devoted to twentieth-century works of art that conclude each chapter of this book. In these vignettes, images that once stood in late medieval churches now find themselves among works of art from the more recent past with which they share certain formal characteristics. These surreal encounters compel us to reckon with affinities between images from different times and places. Turning on its head the pejorative (art-historical) use of the term pseudomorphosis — formal resemblance where there is no similarity of artistic intent — Powell explores what happens to our understanding of historically and conceptually distant works of art when they look alike.

The Untimely Present

The Untimely Present PDF

Author: Idelber Avelar

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780822324157

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The Untimely Present examines the fiction produced in the aftermath of the recent Latin American dictatorships, particularly those in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Idelber Avelar argues that through their legacy of social trauma and obliteration of history, these military regimes gave rise to unique and revealing practices of mourning that pervade the literature of this region. The theory of postdictatorial writing developed here is informed by a rereading of the links between mourning and mimesis in Plato, Nietzsche's notion of the untimely, Benjamin's theory of allegory, and psychoanalytic / deconstructive conceptions of mourning. Avelar starts by offering new readings of works produced before the dictatorship era, in what is often considered the boom of Latin American fiction. Distancing himself from previous celebratory interpretations, he understands the boom as a manifestation of mourning for literature's declining aura. Against this background, Avelar offers a reassessment of testimonial forms, social scientific theories of authoritarianism, current transformations undergone by the university, and an analysis of a number of novels by some of today's foremost Latin American writers--such as Ricardo Piglia, Silviano Santiago, Diamela Eltit, João Gilberto Noll, and Tununa Mercado. Avelar shows how the 'untimely' quality of these narratives is related to the position of literature itself, a mode of expression threatened with obsolescence. This book will appeal to scholars and students of Latin American literature and politics, cultural studies, and comparative literature, as well as to all those interested in the role of literature in postmodernity.

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