The Geometry Of Modernism

Addressing both the literature and the visual arts of Anglo-American modernism, The Geometry of Modernism recovers a crucial development of modernism's early years that until now has received little sustained critical attention: the distinctive idiom composed of geometric forms and metaphors generated within the early modernist movement of Vorticism, formed in London in 1914. Focusing on the work of Wyndham Lewis, leader of the Vorticist movement, as well as Ezra Pound, H.D., and William Butler Yeats, Hickman examines the complex of motives out of which Lewis initially forged the geometric lexicon of Vorticism—and then how Pound, H.D., and Yeats later responded to it and the values that it encoded, enlisting both the geometric vocabulary and its attendant assumptions and ideals, in transmuted form, in their later modernist work. Placing the genesis and appropriation of the geometric idiom in historical context, Hickman explores how despite its brevity as a movement, Vorticism in fact exerted considerable impact on modernist work of the years between the wars, in that its geometric idiom enabled modernist writers to articulate their responses to both personal and political crises of the 1930s and 1940s. Informed by extensive archival research as well as treatment of several of the least-known texts of the modernist milieu, The Geometry of Modernism clarifies and enriches the legacy of this vital period.

Modernism's Other Work challenges deeply held critical beliefs about the meaning-in particular the political meaning-of modernism's commitment to the work of art as an object detached from the world. Ranging over works of poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, and film, it argues that modernism's core aesthetic problem-the artwork's status as an object, and a subject's relation to it-poses fundamental questions of agency, freedom, and politics. With fresh accounts of works by canonical figures such as William Carlos Williams and Marcel Duchamp, and transformative readings of less-studied writers such as William Gaddis and Amiri Baraka, Siraganian reinterprets the relationship between aesthetic autonomy and politics. Through attentive readings, the study reveals how political questions have always been modernism's critical work, even when writers such as Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis boldly assert the art object's immunity from the world's interpretations. Reorienting our understanding of the period, Siraganian demonstrates that the freedom of the art object from the reader's meaning presented a way to imagine an individual's complicated liberty within the state. Offering readers an original encounter with modernism, Modernism's Other Work will interest literary and art historians, literary theorists, critics, and scholars in cultural studies.

Grace Crowley has been recognized as a product of European modernism and was one of the leading innovators of geometric abstraction in Australia. Having studied in Paris in the 1920s with one of the leading art teachers, writers and theorists, André Lhote, she returned to Australia having mastered the complex mathematics and geometry of the golden section and dynamic symmetry, that had become a framework for modernism. Through her teaching of these compositional techniques at the most progressive modern art school in Sydney in the 1930s, she became a crucial influence on the group of artists now recognized as the historical forerunners to American colour-field painting introduced to Australia in the 1960s, and Australian abstraction. Through her close friendship with Anne Dangar, who played a critical role in the success of Albert Gleizes’ utopian art colony in rural France, Crowley maintained contact with mainstream European modernism and links to the Abstraction-Creation Group in Paris. During the 1940s and 1950s, Crowley worked with fellow-artist Ralph Balson, and together they developed their own style of geometric abstract art which reflected the spiritual dimensions of Kandinsky and Mondrian. Although undervalued in her own time, the sincerity and uncompromising quality of her work that transcends national boundaries, makes her one of the most important Australian women artists of her generation.

Addresses the early twentieth-century intersection of scientific and religious discourse exploring literary modernism through the lens of cultural history, focusing on the works of H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer. It covers a range of topics such as electromagnetism and sexuality, dance, and theories of spiritual evolution.

The phase of American architectural history we call 'mid-century modernism,' 1940-1980, saw the spread of Modern Movement tenets of functionalism, social service and anonymity into mainstream practice. It also saw the spread of their seeming opposites. Temples, arcades, domes, and other traditional types occur in both modernist and traditionalist forms from the 1950s to the 1970s. Hut Pavilion Shrine examines this crossroads of modernism and the archetypal, and critiques its buildings and theory. The book centers on one particularly important and omnipresent type, the pavilion - a type which was the basis of major work by Louis I. Kahn, Paul Rudolph, Philip Johnson, Minoru Yamasaki, and other eminent architects. While focusing primarily on the architecture culture of the United States, it also includes the work of British, European Team X, and Scandinavian designers and writers. Making connections between formal analysis, historical context, and theory, the book continues lines of inquiry which have been pursued by Neil Levine and Anthony Vidler on representation, and by Sarah Goldhagen and Alice Friedman on modernism’s 'forbidden' elements of the honorific and the visually pleasurable. It highlights the significance of 'pavilionizing' mid-century designers such as Victor Lundy, John Johansen, Eero Saarinen, and Edward Durell Stone, and shows how frequently essentialist and traditionalist types appeared in the roadside vernacular of drive-in restaurants, gas stations, furniture and car showrooms, branch banks, and motels. The book ties together the threads in mid-century architectural theory that addressed aspects of type, 'essential' structure, and primal 'humanistic' aspects of environment-making and discusses how these concerns outlived the mid-century moment, and in the designs and writings of Aldo Rossi and others they paved the way for Post-Modernism.

A History of Modernist Poetry examines innovative anglophone poetries from decadence to the post-war period. The first of its three parts considers formal and contextual issues, including myth, politics, gender, and race, while the second and third parts discuss a wide range of individual poets, including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, as well as key movements such as Imagism, Objectivism, and the Harlem Renaissance. This book also addresses the impact of both World Wars on experimental poetries and the crucial role of magazines in disseminating and proselytizing on behalf of poetic modernism. The collection concludes with a wide-ranging discussion of the inheritance of modernism in recent writing on both sides of the Atlantic.

In addition to her readings of a fascinating array of works---The Picture of Dorian Gray, Heart of Darkness --