Modernism's Inhuman Worlds

Modernism's Inhuman Worlds PDF Author: Rasheed Tazudeen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501776509
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Modernism's Inhuman Worlds explores the centrality of ecological precarity, species indeterminacy, planetary change, and the specter of extinction to modernist and contemporary metamodernist literatures. Modernist ecologies, Rasheed Tazudeen argues, emerge in response to the enigma of how to imagine inhuman being—including soils, forests, oceans, and the earth itself—through languages and epistemologies that have only ever been humanist. How might (meta)modernist aesthetics help us to imagine (with) inhuman worlds, including the worlds still to be made on the other side of mass extinction? Through innovative readings of canonical and emergent modernist and metamodernist works, Tazudeen theorizes inhuman modernism as a call toward further receptivity to the worlds, beings, and relations that tend to go unthought within Western humanist epistemologies. Modernist engagements with the figures of enigma, riddle, and metaphor, according to the book's central argument, offer a means toward what Franz Kafka calls an "otherwise" speaking, based on language's obliqueness to inhuman and planetary being. Drawing on ecocriticism, decolonial and feminist science studies, postcolonial theory, inhuman geography, and sound studies, Tazudeen analyzes an inhuman modernist lineage—spanning from Darwin, Carroll, and Flaubert, through Joyce, Kafka, and Woolf, to contemporary poetic works—as both part of a collaborative rethinking of modernism's planetary and inhuman aesthetics, as well as occasions for imagining new modes of livingness for the extinctions to come.

Modernism's Inhuman Worlds

Modernism's Inhuman Worlds PDF Author: Rasheed Tazudeen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501776509
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Modernism's Inhuman Worlds explores the centrality of ecological precarity, species indeterminacy, planetary change, and the specter of extinction to modernist and contemporary metamodernist literatures. Modernist ecologies, Rasheed Tazudeen argues, emerge in response to the enigma of how to imagine inhuman being—including soils, forests, oceans, and the earth itself—through languages and epistemologies that have only ever been humanist. How might (meta)modernist aesthetics help us to imagine (with) inhuman worlds, including the worlds still to be made on the other side of mass extinction? Through innovative readings of canonical and emergent modernist and metamodernist works, Tazudeen theorizes inhuman modernism as a call toward further receptivity to the worlds, beings, and relations that tend to go unthought within Western humanist epistemologies. Modernist engagements with the figures of enigma, riddle, and metaphor, according to the book's central argument, offer a means toward what Franz Kafka calls an "otherwise" speaking, based on language's obliqueness to inhuman and planetary being. Drawing on ecocriticism, decolonial and feminist science studies, postcolonial theory, inhuman geography, and sound studies, Tazudeen analyzes an inhuman modernist lineage—spanning from Darwin, Carroll, and Flaubert, through Joyce, Kafka, and Woolf, to contemporary poetic works—as both part of a collaborative rethinking of modernism's planetary and inhuman aesthetics, as well as occasions for imagining new modes of livingness for the extinctions to come.

The Demise of the Inhuman

The Demise of the Inhuman PDF Author: Ana Monteiro-Ferreira
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 143845225X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Employs a critical Afrocentric reading of Western constructions of knowledge so as to overcome the dehumanizing tendencies of modernity. Afrocentricity is the most intellectually dominant idea in the African world, one that is having a growing impact on social science discourse. This paradigm, philosophically rooted in African cultures and values, fundamentally challenges major epistemological traditions in Western thought, such as modernism and postmodernism, Marxism, existentialism, feminism, and postcolonialism. In The Demise of the Inhuman, Ana Monteiro-Ferreira reviews what Molefi Kete Asante has called the “infrastructures of dominance and privilege,” arguing that Western concepts such as individualism, colonialism, race and ethnicity, universalism, and progress, are insufficient to overcome various forms of oppression. Afrocentricity, she argues, can help lead us beyond Western structures of thought that have held sway since the early

Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity

Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity PDF Author: Jeff Wallace
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474461689
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Explores abstraction as a keyword in aesthetic modernism and in critical thinking since Marx

Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism PDF Author: Ariane Mildenberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501302736
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism brings into dialogue Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology with modernist art, literature, music, film and neurophysiological discoveries, opening up the complexities of the philosopher's phenomenology of perception to a broader audience across the arts. An important resource for anyone interested in the links between modernism and philosophy, Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism offers close readings of Merleau-Ponty's key texts, explores modernist works in light of his thought, and provides an extended glossary of Merleau-Ponty's central terms and concepts.

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms PDF Author: Mark Wollaeger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199324700
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 751

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms expands the scope of modernism beyond its traditional focus on English and Irish literature to explore the contributions of artists from countries and regions like the US, Cuba, Spain, the Balkans, China, Japan, India, Vietnam, and Nigeria.

In Search of the Lost World: The Modernist Quest for the Thing, Matter, and Body

In Search of the Lost World: The Modernist Quest for the Thing, Matter, and Body PDF Author: Tsaiyi Wu
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1648896294
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
From a historical perspective, the book studies how modernist artists, as the first generation who began to rethink intensively the legacy of German Idealism, sought to recreate the self so as to recreate their relationships with the material world. Theoretically, the book converses with the topical de-anthropocentric interests in the 21st century and proposes that the artist may escape human-centeredness through the transformation of the self. Part One, “Artificiality,” begins the discussion with the fin-de-siècle cult of artificiality, where artists such as Theophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, J.K. Huysmans, and Gustave Moreau dedicate themselves to love stony sphinxes, marble statues, and inorganic appearances. The cult of artificiality is a mischievous subversion to Hegel’s maxim that inwardness is superior to matter. In the cult of artificiality, art is superior to nature, though art is no longer defined as immaterial imagination but rather reconfigured as mysterious appearances that defy signification and subjugate the feeling heart. Part Two, “Auto-philosophical Fiction,” discusses the genre where the artists (Marcel Proust, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf) set philosophical ideas in the laboratory of their lives and therefore translate their aesthetic ideals—the way they wish to relate to the world—into a journey of self-examination and self-cultivation. In Pater’s novel 'Marius the Epicurean', the hero explores how a philosophical percept may be translated into sentiments and actions, demonstrating that literature is a unique approach to truth as it renders theory into a transformative experience. Exploring the latest findings of empiricist psychology, the artists seek to escape the Kantian trap by cultivating their powers of reception and to register passing thoughts and sensations. Together, the book argues that de-anthropocentrism cannot be predicated upon a metaphysics that presumes universal subjectivity but must be a form of aesthetic inquiry that recreates the self in order to recreate our relationships with the world.

Modernism, Narrative and Humanism

Modernism, Narrative and Humanism PDF Author: Paul Sheehan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139434616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
In Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, Paul Sheehan attempts to redefine modernist narrative for the twenty-first century. For Sheehan modernism presents a major form of critique of the fundamental presumptions of humanism. By pairing key modernist writers with philosophical critics of the humanist tradition, he shows how modernists sought to discover humanism's inhuman potential. He examines the development of narrative during the modernist period and sets it against, among others, the nineteenth-century philosophical writings of Schopenhauer , Darwin and Nietzsche. Focusing on the major novels and poetics of Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf and Beckett, Sheehan investigates these writers' mistrust of humanist orthodoxy and their consequent transformations and disfigurations of narrative order. He reveals the crucial link between the modernist novel's narrative concerns and its philosophical orientation in a book that will be of compelling interest to scholars of modernism and literary theory.

Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism PDF Author: Paul Ardoin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441188371
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Henri Bergson is frequently cited amongst the holy trinity of major influences on Modernism-literary and otherwise-alongside Sigmund Freud and William James. Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism has re-popularized Bergson for the 21st century, so much so that, perhaps, our Bergson is Deleuze's Bergson. Despite renewed interest in Bergson, his influence remains understudied and consequently undervalued. While books examining the impact of Freud and James on Modernism abound, Bergson's impact, though widely acknowledged, has been closely examined much more rarely. Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism remedies this deficiency in three ways. First, it offers close readings and critiques of six pivotal texts. Second, it reassesses Bergson's impact on Modernism while also tracing his continuing importance to literature, media, and philosophy throughout the twentieth and into the 21st century. In its final section it provides an extended glossary of Bergsonian terms, complete with extensive examples and citations of their use across his texts. The glossary also maps the influence of Bergson's work by including entries on related writers, all of whom Bergson either corresponded with or critiqued.

American Poetry after Modernism

American Poetry after Modernism PDF Author: Albert Gelpi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107025249
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Albert Gelpi's American Poetry after Modernism is a study of sixteen major American poets of the postwar period, from Robert Lowell to Adrienne Rich. Gelpi argues that a distinctly American poetic tradition was solidified in the later half the twentieth century, thus severing it from British conventions.

Cézanne and Modernism

Cézanne and Modernism PDF Author: Joyce Medina
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791422311
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book explores how traditional relations among the arts have changed in our time, focusing on the radical transformation of Paul Cezanne.