Biological Modernism

Honorable Mention for the DAAD/GSA Book Prize for the Best Book in Germanistik or Cultural Studies Biological Modernism identifies an intellectual current in the Weimar Republic that drew on biology, organicism, vitalism, and other discourses associated with living nature in order to redefine the human being for a modern, technological age. Contrary to the assumption that any turn toward the organic indicated a reactionary flight from modernity or a longing for wholeness, Carl Gelderloos shows that biology and other discourses of living nature offered a nuanced way of theorizing modernity rather than fleeing from it. Organic life, instead of representing a stabilizing sense of wholeness, by the 1920s had become a scientific, philosophical, and disciplinary problem. In their work, figures such as Alfred Döblin, Ernst Jünger, Helmuth Plessner, and August Sander interrogated the relationships between technology, nature, and the human and radically reconsidered the relationship between the disciplines as well as the epistemological and political consequences for defining the human being. Biological Modernism will be of interest to scholars of German literature and culture, literary modernism, photography, philosophical anthropology, twentieth-century intellectual history, the politics of culture, and the history of science.

Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-siècle field of “physiological aesthetics,” which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to appreciate beauty and art, changed the way poets, artists, and musicians worked and brought a dramatic transformation to the idea of art itself.

Examining the complex intersections between art and scientific approaches to the natural world, Biocentrism and Modernism reveals another side to the development of Modernism. While many historians have framed this movement as being mechanistic and "against" nature, the essays in this collection illuminate the role that nature-centric ideologies played in late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century Modernism. The essays in Biocentrism and Modernism contend that it is no accident that Modernism arose at the same time as the field of modern biology. From nineteenth-century discoveries, to the emergence of the current environmentalist movement during the 1960s, artists, architects, and urban planners have responded to currents in the scientific world. Sections of the volume treat both philosophic worldviews and their applications in theory, historiography, and urban design. This collection also features specific case studies of individual artists, including Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jackson Pollock.

In the thirty years after World War II, American intellectual and artistic life changed as dramatically as did the rest of society. Gone were the rebellious lions of modernism—Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky—and nearing exhaustion were those who took up their mantle as abstract expressionism gave way to pop art, and the barren formalism associated with the so-called high modernists wilted before the hothouse cultural brew of the 1960s. According to conventional thinking, it was around this time that postmodernism with its characteristic skepticism and relativism was born. In Late Modernism, historian Robert Genter remaps the landscape of American modernism in the early decades of the Cold War, tracing the combative debate among artists, writers, and intellectuals over the nature of the aesthetic form in an age of mass politics and mass culture. Dispensing with traditional narratives that present this moment as marking the exhaustion of modernism, Genter argues instead that the 1950s were the apogee of the movement, as American practitioners—abstract expressionists, Beat poets, formalist critics, color-field painters, and critical theorists, among others—debated the relationship between form and content, tradition and innovation, aesthetics and politics. In this compelling work of intellectual and cultural history Genter presents an invigorated tradition of late modernism, centered on the work of Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Jasper Johns, Norman Brown, and James Baldwin, a tradition that overcame the conservative and reactionary politics of competing modernist practitioners and paved the way for the postmodern turn of the 1960s.

Modernism and Eugenics comprehensively explores modern Europe's fixation with eugenic programmes of racial and national purification. It convincingly demonstrates that between 1870 and 1940 eugenicists were not only preoccupied with rescuing the individual from the anomie of modernity but equally championed a glorious racial destiny for the nation.

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.

Reflects contemporary paradigm shifts in embryology and evolutionary theory through formal experimentation in the modernist BildungsromanModernist Life Histories explores how new models of embryonic development helped inspire new kinds of coming-of-age plots during the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on novels by E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and Samuel Beckett, the book links narrative experiments with shuffled chronology, repeated beginnings and sex change to new discoveries in the biological sciences. It also reveals new connections between the so-called Two Cultures by highlighting how scientific ideas and narratives enter the literary realm.Key FeaturesProvides a unique perspective on the Bildungsroman (novel of formation), one of the most discussed genres in recent scholarly work on modernismApproaches the study of science and literature with exceptionally close attention to the details of scientific models, their cultural appropriations, and their political implicationsMakes the first thoroughgoing argument for twentieth-century biology as a positive influence on modernist poetics and ethicsModels how narrative theory can serve the goals of interdisciplinary research

Friedrich Nietzsche believed his own work represented the dawning of a new historical era, and, despite the fact that he lived most of his sane life suffering in obscurity, it is not an exaggeration to say that his vision helped lay the foundations for modernism in style, substance and attitude. Nietzsche was himself devoted to the modern, for he reinterpreted every philosophy, every historical figure and event, every movement that came before him. This reconceptualization of the past through new, modern eyes opened up Nietzsche's thinking to exploring daring possibilities for the future. This prophetic boldness, which is so unique to his style, seduced the modernist generation across the spectrum. He was read by early Zionists as well as by Nazi racial theorists; by Thomas Mann and as well as by Salvador Dali. His influence stretched from psychoanalysis to anarchist politics. Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism traces the effect of Nietzsche's thinking upon a diverse set of problems: from ontology, to politics, to musical and literary aesthetics. The first section of the volume is a series of essays, each exploring a major work of Nietzsche's, explaining its significance while contributing new interpretations of the text. The middle portion connects Nietzsche's thought to the various strands of modernism in which it reveals itself. The final section is a glossary of key terms that Nietzsche uses throughout his works. An excellent resource for any scholar attempting to conceptualize the foundations of modernism or the historical importance of Nietzsche, this volume seeks to outline the philosopher's works and their reception amongst the generations that immediately followed his passing.