Conversion to Modernism

Conversion to Modernism PDF Author: Francis M. Naumann
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813531489
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Man Ray (1890-1976) has long been considered one of the most versatile and innovative artists of the twentieth century. As a painter, writer, sculptor, photographer, and filmmaker, he is best known for his intimate association with the French Surrealist group in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly for his highly inventive and unconventional photographic images. These remarkable accomplishments, however, have tended to overshadow the importance of his earlier work--significant not only for comprehending Man Ray's future artistic development, but also for fleshing out our understanding of the visual arts in America during one of the most important and crucial phases of the evolution of modernism. The book, and the exhibition for which this work will serve as the catalog, concentrate on Man Ray's production from 1907 to 1917. Conversion to Modernism will be the first comprehensive, fully illustrated work to examine this artist's seminal years. The show and the catalog begin with Man Ray's high school years in Brooklyn, his studies at the Art Students League and the American Academy in New York, and the time he spent in life drawing classes at the more progressive Ferrer Center From 1913 to 1915, Man Ray lived in a small artists' colony in Grantwood, New Jersey. It was here, studying with Samuel Halpert (a former student of Matisse), that Man Ray began to become the artist we know today. The last section of the show and of the book include recently discovered photographs and other works that are influenced by a knowledge of the emergent Dada movement. Here is Man Ray in recognizable form just before he leaves the country for France in 1921. This exhibit will first be on display at the Montclair Art Museum from January 26 through March 2003. It will then travel to museums in Athens, Georgia, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

Conversion to Modernism

Conversion to Modernism PDF Author: Francis M. Naumann
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813531489
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
Man Ray (1890-1976) has long been considered one of the most versatile and innovative artists of the twentieth century. As a painter, writer, sculptor, photographer, and filmmaker, he is best known for his intimate association with the French Surrealist group in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly for his highly inventive and unconventional photographic images. These remarkable accomplishments, however, have tended to overshadow the importance of his earlier work--significant not only for comprehending Man Ray's future artistic development, but also for fleshing out our understanding of the visual arts in America during one of the most important and crucial phases of the evolution of modernism. The book, and the exhibition for which this work will serve as the catalog, concentrate on Man Ray's production from 1907 to 1917. Conversion to Modernism will be the first comprehensive, fully illustrated work to examine this artist's seminal years. The show and the catalog begin with Man Ray's high school years in Brooklyn, his studies at the Art Students League and the American Academy in New York, and the time he spent in life drawing classes at the more progressive Ferrer Center From 1913 to 1915, Man Ray lived in a small artists' colony in Grantwood, New Jersey. It was here, studying with Samuel Halpert (a former student of Matisse), that Man Ray began to become the artist we know today. The last section of the show and of the book include recently discovered photographs and other works that are influenced by a knowledge of the emergent Dada movement. Here is Man Ray in recognizable form just before he leaves the country for France in 1921. This exhibit will first be on display at the Montclair Art Museum from January 26 through March 2003. It will then travel to museums in Athens, Georgia, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

The Orient of Style

The Orient of Style PDF Author: Beryl Schlossman
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822310945
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
In this study of modernist aesthetics, Beryl Schlossman reveals how for such writers as Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, and Charles Baudelaire, the Orient came to symbolize the highest aspirations of literary representation. She demonstrates that through allegory, modernism became a style itself, a style that married the ancient and the modern and that emerged as both a cause and an effect, both an ideal construct and an textual materiality, all symbolized by the Orient—land of style, place of plurality, and site of the coexistence of holy lands. Toward the end of Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator describes the act of creating a work of art as a conversion of sensation into a spiritual equivalent. By means of such allegories of “conversion,” Schlossman shows, the modernist artist disappeared within the work of art and left behind the trace of his sublime vocation, a vocation in which he was transformed, in Schlossman’s words, “into a kind of priest kneeling at the altar of beauty before the masked divinity of representation.” The author shows how allegory—the representation of the symbolic as something real—was adapted by modernist writers to reflect subjectivity while masking an authorial origin. She reveals how modernist allegory arose, as Walter Benjamin suggests, at the crossroads of history, sociology, economics, urban architecture, and art—providing a kind of map of capitalism—and was produced through the eyes of a melancholic gazing at a “monument of absence.”

Constellation of Genius

Constellation of Genius PDF Author: Kevin Jackson
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374710333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Ezra Pound referred to 1922 as Year One of a new era. It was the year that began with the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and ended with the publication of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, two works that were arguably "the sun and moon" of modernist literature, some would say of modernity itself. In Constellation of Genius, Kevin Jackson puts the titanic achievements of Joyce and Eliot in the context of the world in which their works first appeared. As Jackson writes in his introduction, "On all sides, and in every field, there was a frenzy of innovation." It is in 1922 that Hitchcock directs his first feature; Kandinsky and Klee join the Bauhaus; the first AM radio station is launched; Walt Disney releases his first animated shorts; and Louis Armstrong takes a train from New Orleans to Chicago, heralding the age of modern jazz. On other fronts, Einstein wins the Nobel Prize in Physics, insulin is introduced to treat diabetes, and the tomb of Tutankhamun is discovered. As Jackson writes, the sky was "blazing with a ‘constellation of genius' of a kind that had never been known before, and has never since been rivaled." Constellation of Genius traces an unforgettable journey through the diaries of the actors, anthropologists, artists, dancers, designers, filmmakers, philosophers, playwrights, politicians, and scientists whose lives and works—over the course of twelve months—brought a seismic shift in the way we think, splitting the cultural world in two. Was this a matter of inevitability or of coincidence? That is for the reader of this romp, this hugely entertaining chronicle, to decide.

Converting Cultures

Converting Cultures PDF Author: Dennis Washburn
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047420330
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
This volume fundamentally improves our understanding of processes like the secularization of society, and the growth of mass ideological movements, by looking upon these transformations to modernity as a species of conversion akin to religious conversion. The geographical areas covered by the contributors—the Ottoman domain, India, China, and Japan—provide striking examples of the dynamic force of conversion as a reaction to the tremendous pressures exerted by colonialism and imperialism and by the types of transformations constitutive of modernity.

Outside the Fold

Outside the Fold PDF Author: Gauri Viswanathan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400843480
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Outside the Fold is a radical reexamination of religious conversion. Gauri Viswanathan skillfully argues that conversion is an interpretive act that belongs in the realm of cultural criticism. To that end, this work examines key moments in colonial and postcolonial history to show how conversion questions the limitations of secular ideologies, particularly the discourse of rights central to both the British empire and the British nation-state. Implicit in such questioning is an attempt to construct an alternative epistemological and ethical foundation of national community. Viswanathan grounds her study in an examination of two simultaneous and, she asserts, linked events: the legal emancipation of religious minorities in England and the acculturation of colonial subjects to British rule. The author views these two apparently disparate events as part of a common pattern of national consolidation that produced the English state. She seeks to explain why resistance, in both cases, frequently took the form of religious conversion, especially to "minority" or alternative religions. Confronting the general characterization of conversion as assimilative and annihilating of identity, Viswanathan demonstrates that a willful change of religion can be seen instead as an act of opposition. Outside the Fold concludes that, as a form of cultural crossing, conversion comes to represent a vital release into difference. Through the figure of the convert, Viswanathan addresses the vexing question of the role of belief and minority discourse in modern society. She establishes new points of contact between the convert as religious dissenter and as colonial subject. This convergence provides a transcultural perspective not otherwise visible in literary and historical texts. It allows for radically new readings of significant figures as diverse as John Henry Newman, Pandita Ramabai, Annie Besant, and B. R. Ambedkar, as well as close studies of court cases, census reports, and popular English fiction. These varying texts illuminate the means by which discourses of religious identity are produced, contained, or opposed by the languages of law, reason, and classificatory knowledge. Outside the Fold is a challenging, provocative contribution to the multidisciplinary field of cultural studies.

William James

William James PDF Author: Robert D. Richardson
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547526733
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 638

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Book Description
The definitive biography of the fascinating William James, whose life and writing put an indelible stamp on psychology, philosophy, teaching, and religion—on modernism itself. Often cited as the “father of American psychology,” William James was an intellectual luminary who made significant contributions to at least five fields: psychology, philosophy, religious studies, teaching, and literature. A member of one of the most unusual and notable of American families, James struggled to achieve greatness amid the brilliance of his theologian father; his brother, the novelist Henry James; and his sister, Alice James. After studying medicine, he ultimately realized that his true interests lay in philosophy and psychology, a choice that guided his storied career at Harvard, where he taught some of America’s greatest minds. But it is James’s contributions to intellectual study that reveal the true complexity of man. In this biography that seeks to understand James’s life through his work—including Principles of Psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and Pragmatism—Robert D. Richardson has crafted an exceptionally insightful work that explores the mind of a genius, resulting in “a gripping and often inspiring story of intellectual and spiritual adventure” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). “A magnificent biography.” —The Washington Post

Passage Through Hell

Passage Through Hell PDF Author: David Lawrence Pike
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801431630
Category : Civilization, Medieval, in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Taking the culturally resonant motif of the descent to the underworld as his guiding thread, David L. Pike traces the interplay between myth and history in medieval and modernist literature. Passage through Hell suggests new approaches to the practice of comparative literature, and a possible escape from the current morass of competing critical schools and ideologies. Pike's readings of Louis Ferdinand Céline and Walter Benjamin reveal the tensions at work in the modern appropriation of structures derived from ancient and medieval descents. His book shows how these structures were redefined in modernism and persist in contemporary critical practice. In order to recover the historical corpus of modernism, he asserts, it is necessary to acknowledge the attraction that medieval forms and motifs held for modernist literature and theory. By pairing the writings of the postwar German dramatist and novelist Peter Weiss with Dante's Commedia, and Christine de Pizan with Virginia Woolf, Pike argues for a new level of complexity in the relation between medieval and modern poetics. Pike's supple and persuasive reading of the Commedia resituates that text within the contradictions of medieval tradition. He contends that the Dantean allegory of conversion, altered to suit the exigencies of modernism, maintains its hold over current literature and theory. The postwar writers Pike treats--Weiss, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott--exemplify alternate strategies for negotiating the legacy of modernism. The passage through hell emerges as a way of disentangling images of the past from their interpretation in the present.

Affective Mapping

Affective Mapping PDF Author: Jonathan FLATLEY
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674036964
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The surprising claim of this book is that dwelling on loss is not necessarily depressing. Instead, embracing melancholy can be a road back to contact with others and can lead people to productively remap their relationship to the world around them. Flatley demonstrates that a seemingly disparate set of modernist writers and thinkers showed how aesthetic activity can give us the means to comprehend and change our relation to loss.

A New Model of Religious Conversion

A New Model of Religious Conversion PDF Author: Ines W. Jindra
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900426650X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Based on the analysis of 52 conversion narratives to various religious groups, A New Model of Religious Conversion utilizes case studies for comparison of converts' backgrounds, network influence, and conversion narratives. The author convincingly illustrates a "fit" between the converts' background and the religion they convert to, such as between disorganized family backgrounds and highly structured religions. Conversely, those from highly structured backgrounds often convert to more "open" groups. The book also makes it clear that not all conversions are influenced by networks or align themselves with a social constructivist view of a conversion as an "account." Taking converts' trajectories seriously, the author makes a strong case for the application of biographical sociology to the study of conversion and (American) sociology overall.

How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York

How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York PDF Author: Marius de Zayas
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262540964
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Marius de Zayas (1880-1961), a Mexican artist and writer whose witty caricatures of New York's theater, dance, and social elite brought him to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz and his circle at "291," was among the most dedicated and effective propagandists of modern art during the early years of this century. His writings were the first to provide the American public with an intellectual basis upon which to understand and eventually appreciate the newest artistic developments. How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York, originally written in the 1940s, is a fascinating chronicle assembled from de Zayas's personal archive of photographs and from newspaper reviews of the exhibitions he discusses, beginning with those held at the Stieglitz gallery and including important shows mounted in his own galleries: the Modern Gallery (1915-1918) and the De Zayas Gallery (1919-1921)