The Mental Life of Modernism

The Mental Life of Modernism PDF Author: Samuel Jay Keyser
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262043491
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
An argument that Modernism is a cognitive phenomenon rather than a cultural one. At the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry, music, and painting all underwent a sea change. Poetry abandoned rhyme and meter; music ceased to be tonally centered; and painting no longer aimed at faithful representation. These artistic developments have been attributed to cultural factors ranging from the Industrial Revolution and the technical innovation of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser argues that the stylistic innovations of Western modernism reflect not a cultural shift but a cognitive one. Behind modernism is the same cognitive phenomenon that led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century: the brain coming up against its natural limitations. Keyser argues that the transformation in poetry, music, and painting (the so-called sister arts) is the result of the abandonment of a natural aesthetic based on a set of rules shared between artist and audience, and that this is virtually the same cognitive shift that occurred when scientists abandoned the mechanical philosophy of the Galilean revolution. The cultural explanations for Modernism may still be relevant, but they are epiphenomenal rather than causal. Artists felt that traditional forms of art had been exhausted, and they began to resort to private formats—Easter eggs with hidden and often inaccessible meaning. Keyser proposes that when artists discarded their natural rule-governed aesthetic, it marked a cognitive shift; general intelligence took over from hardwired proclivity. Artists used a different part of the brain to create, and audiences were forced to play catch up.

The Mental Life of Modernism

The Mental Life of Modernism PDF Author: Samuel Jay Keyser
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262043491
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
An argument that Modernism is a cognitive phenomenon rather than a cultural one. At the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry, music, and painting all underwent a sea change. Poetry abandoned rhyme and meter; music ceased to be tonally centered; and painting no longer aimed at faithful representation. These artistic developments have been attributed to cultural factors ranging from the Industrial Revolution and the technical innovation of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser argues that the stylistic innovations of Western modernism reflect not a cultural shift but a cognitive one. Behind modernism is the same cognitive phenomenon that led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century: the brain coming up against its natural limitations. Keyser argues that the transformation in poetry, music, and painting (the so-called sister arts) is the result of the abandonment of a natural aesthetic based on a set of rules shared between artist and audience, and that this is virtually the same cognitive shift that occurred when scientists abandoned the mechanical philosophy of the Galilean revolution. The cultural explanations for Modernism may still be relevant, but they are epiphenomenal rather than causal. Artists felt that traditional forms of art had been exhausted, and they began to resort to private formats—Easter eggs with hidden and often inaccessible meaning. Keyser proposes that when artists discarded their natural rule-governed aesthetic, it marked a cognitive shift; general intelligence took over from hardwired proclivity. Artists used a different part of the brain to create, and audiences were forced to play catch up.

Modernist Lives

Modernist Lives PDF Author: Claire Battershill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350043842
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Focusing on the biographies and autobiographies published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press from 1917-1946, Claire Battershill shows the importance of publishing history in understanding modernist literary work and culture. Modernist Lives draws on archival material from the Hogarth Press Business Archive and first editions from the Virginia Woolf Collection at the E. J. Pratt Library to show how the Woolfs' literary theories were expressed in all aspects of their publishing: their marketing strategies, editorial practice and the literary composition of their acquisitions. Featuring the works of figures such as Christopher Isherwood, Henry Green, Viola Tree, Vita Sackville-West and the Woolf's themselves, Battershill illuminates the history of Hogarth books from their composition to their reception by readers and critics.

Staging Modernist Lives

Staging Modernist Lives PDF Author: Sasha Colby
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773548963
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Three modernist women, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), Mina Loy (1882-1966), and Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), came to define the interwar avant-garde through their experimental writing and unconventional pursuits. In Staging Modernist Lives, Sasha Colby dramatizes these women’s lives and writing in three new plays that traverse the origins of modernism, Parisian literary circles, two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and race and gender relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Leveraging each writer’s autobiographical materials, the plays explore the work of H.D., Loy, and Cunard as artists, publishers, and activists, their quests for self-definition amid political and historical upheaval, and their development as modernists among mentors, detractors, lovers, and friends including Bryher Ellerman, Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Arthur Cravan, D.H. Lawrence, and Pablo Neruda. Navigating the emerging field of research-creation, Staging Modernist Lives maps the critical terrain for dramatized literary inquiry. Bridging scholarship and creative practice, extant biographical drama and the possibilities of research-theatre, Staging Modernist Lives demonstrates how performance can deliver literary history to new audiences - and how research in turn reinvigorates itself through performance.

Paris Bride

Paris Bride PDF Author: John Schad
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1950192636
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
"In July 1905, in Paris, a young woman, a bride, becomes Marie Schad. In April 1984, in London, Marie Schad is declared to be no more--indeed, to never have been, and returns to France. Paris Bride pursues this no-woman in a wild attempt to glimpse her face in the modernist crowd. With increasing desperation the pages of Stephane Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Louis Aragon, André and Walter Benjamin are all ransacked for traces of Marie. What is pieced precariously together is an experimental life--a properly modernist life, a life that, by its very obscurity, lives the obscure life of modernism itself.

Modernist Lives

Modernist Lives PDF Author: Claire Battershill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350043834
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Focusing on the biographies and autobiographies published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press from 1917-1946, Claire Battershill shows the importance of publishing history in understanding modernist literary work and culture. Modernist Lives draws on archival material from the Hogarth Press Business Archive and first editions from the Virginia Woolf Collection at the E. J. Pratt Library to show how the Woolfs' literary theories were expressed in all aspects of their publishing: their marketing strategies, editorial practice and the literary composition of their acquisitions. Featuring the works of figures such as Christopher Isherwood, Henry Green, Viola Tree, Vita Sackville-West and the Woolf's themselves, Battershill illuminates the history of Hogarth books from their composition to their reception by readers and critics.

The Passion Projects

The Passion Projects PDF Author: Melanie Micir
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691193118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Examines the biographical projects that modernist women writers undertook to resist the exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, and companions from literary history.

The Extinct Scene

The Extinct Scene PDF Author: Thomas S. Davis
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231537883
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
In 1935, the English writer Stephen Spender wrote that the historical pressures of his era should "turn the reader's and writer's attention outwards from himself to the world." Combining historical, formalist, and archival approaches, Thomas S. Davis examines late modernism's decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder. The Extinct Scene reads a range of mid-century texts, films, and phenomena that reflect the decline of the British Empire and seismic shifts in the global political order. Davis follows the rise of documentary film culture and the British Documentary Film Movement, especially the work of John Grierson, Humphrey Jennings, and Basil Wright. He then considers the influence of late modernist periodical culture on social attitudes and customs, and presents original analyses of novels by Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Colin MacInnes; the interwar travel narratives of W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and George Orwell; the wartime gothic fiction of Elizabeth Bowen; the poetry of H. D.; the sketches of Henry Moore; and the postimperial Anglophone Caribbean works of Vic Reid, Sam Selvon, and George Lamming. By considering this group of writers and artists, Davis recasts late modernism as an art of scale: by detailing the particulars of everyday life, these figures could better project large-scale geopolitical events and crises.

Modernist Lives

Modernist Lives PDF Author: Claire Battershill
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350043855
Category : Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"Focusing on the biographies and autobiographies published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press from 1917-1946, Claire Battershill shows the importance of publishing history in understanding modernist literary work and culture. Modernist Lives draws on archival material from the Hogarth Press Business Archive and first editions from the Virginia Woolf Collection at the E.J. Pratt Library to show how the Woolfs' literary theories were expressed in all aspects of their publishing: their marketing strategies, editorial practice and the literary composition of their acquisitions. Featuring the works of figures such as Christopher Isherwood, Henry Green, Viola Tree, Vita Sackville-West and the Woolf's themselves, Battershill illuminates the history of Hogarth books from their composition to their reception by readers and critics."--Bloomsbury Publishing

Machines for Living

Machines for Living PDF Author: Victoria Rosner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192583816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Changes in the routines of domestic life were among the most striking social phenomena of the period between the two World Wars, when the home came into focus as a problem to be solved: re-imagined, streamlined, electrified, and generally cleaned up. Modernist writers understood themselves to be living in an epochal moment when the design and meaning of home life were reconceived. Moving among literature, architecture, design, science, and technology, Machines for Living shows how the modernization of the home led to profound changes in domestic life and relied on a set of emergent concepts, including standardization, scientific method, functionalism, efficiency science, and others, that form the basis of literary modernism and stand at the confluence of modernism and modernity. Even as modernist writers criticized the expanding reach of modernization into the home, they drew on its conceptual vocabulary to develop both the thematic and formal commitments of literary modernism. Rosner's work develops a new methodology for interdisciplinary modernist studies and shows how the reinvention of domestic life is central to modernist literature.

Modernist Life Histories

Modernist Life Histories PDF Author: Newman Daniel Aureliano Newman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474439640
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Reflects contemporary paradigm shifts in embryology and evolutionary theory through formal experimentation in the modernist BildungsromanModernist Life Histories explores how new models of embryonic development helped inspire new kinds of coming-of-age plots during the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on novels by E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and Samuel Beckett, the book links narrative experiments with shuffled chronology, repeated beginnings and sex change to new discoveries in the biological sciences. It also reveals new connections between the so-called Two Cultures by highlighting how scientific ideas and narratives enter the literary realm.Key FeaturesProvides a unique perspective on the Bildungsroman (novel of formation), one of the most discussed genres in recent scholarly work on modernismApproaches the study of science and literature with exceptionally close attention to the details of scientific models, their cultural appropriations, and their political implicationsMakes the first thoroughgoing argument for twentieth-century biology as a positive influence on modernist poetics and ethicsModels how narrative theory can serve the goals of interdisciplinary research