Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 492 g
The Art Object's Political Life
Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 492 g
ISBN: 978-0-19-979655-7
Verlag: Oxford University Press
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. These
political questions have always been modernism's critical work, even when writers such as Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, and William Gaddis boldly assert the art object's immunity from the world's interpretations. Upending our understanding of relationships between aesthetic autonomy and politics, we see that
autonomy from the world was never, for the modernists, a failure of relation to it, which is to say that an art object's autonomy means not liberation from the whole world, but freedom from others ascribing meanings to art objects. Moreover, the reader's or viewer's relation to the art object became a way to envision the political subject's ideal relation to a changing, rejuvenated, but essentially liberal state at a time when the discourse of threatened autonomy pervaded both high and
mass culture. For the modernists, the freedom of the art object from the reader's meaning presented a way to imagine an individual's complicated liberty within the state. Autonomy and threats to autonomy, particularity and universality, detachment and incorporation are all treated in light of liberalism's
perceived promises or failures.
Zielgruppe
Scholars and students of literature and visual arts/art history; readers of Modernism/Modernity, PMLA, Modernist Fiction Studies, Literary Imagination, Poetry, and the Southwest Review
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
Weitere Infos & Material
Introduction
Theorizing Art and Punctuation: Gertrude Stein's Breathless Poetry
Satirizing Frameless Art: Wyndham Lewis's Defense of Representation
Breaking Glass to Save the Frame: William Carlos Williams and Company
Challenging Kitsch Equality: William Gaddis's and Elizabeth Bishop's <"Neo>" Rear-Garde Art
Administering Poetic Breath for the People: Charles Olson and Amiri Baraka
Coda: Universal Breath
Index
