Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity : : Human and Inhuman / / Jeff Wallace.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE Arts 2023
• VerfasserIn: Wallace, Jeff,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture : ECCSMC
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (272 p.) :; 8 B/W illustrations

Explores abstraction as a keyword in aesthetic modernism and in critical thinking since MarxAbstraction as the ‘missing keyword’ in Raymond WilliamsThe writing of abstraction in Marx and MarxismPaul Cézanne and Barnett Newman compared as writer-artists of abstraction New readings of abstraction and the inhuman in the experimental writing of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and Samuel BeckettA close study of Beckett’s ‘Proustian equation’ and its role in a transformed thinking of abstractionAbstraction is one of the most important words in modernism and in the critical thought of modernity, yet its complex work is invariably hidden in plain sight. What do we want from abstraction? Does it refer to thought, or to art? Is it a term of reproach, or of affirmation? Beyond these distinctions, Jeff Wallace’s new intellectual history of abstraction in modernism and modernity proposes that abstraction is always uniquely concerned with the importance and revaluation of the inhuman in and for the human. Wallace’s case studies range across the writings of Raymond Williams and Paul Valéry, Marx and Marxist aesthetics, the discourse on abstract visual art in Cézanne, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Newman, the literary experimentalisms of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett, and the twenty-first-century legacies of modernist abstraction in two forms: the post-Deleuzian resurgence of interest in the philosophies of William James, Henri Bergson and A. N. Whitehead; and the act of looking at the abstract canvas in plays by Yasmina Reza, John Logan and Lee Hall. Contrary to habitual associations of abstraction’s difficulty with the exclusivity of high modernism, Wallace finds an inclusive and democratic impulse at the heart of the difficulty itself – the promise of an abstraction for all.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgements -- Series Editors’ Preface -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Part I -- 1 The missing keyword: Raymond Williams, Paul Valéry -- 2 The force of abstraction: Marx and Marxism -- 3 Abstract, ‘abstract’: modernist visual art -- Part II -- 4 ‘If it can be done why do it’: Gertrude Stein -- 5 ‘Resist the intelligence almost successfully’: Wallace Stevens -- 6 ‘The Proustian equation is never simple’: Samuel Beckett -- Part III -- 7 Writing lived abstraction: James, Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze -- 8 Staging modernist abstraction: Yasmina Reza, John Logan, Lee Hall -- Conclusion: Herbert Read and aesthetic education -- Bibliography -- Index