Description
Modernist
Objects: Literature, Art, Culture is a unique mix of cultural studies, literature, and
visual arts applied to the discrete materiality of modernist objects. The simultaneously
physical and ideological nature of objects has made them remarkably transparent
to critical inquiries into their aesthetic, political, social, historical or
philosophical uses and meanings. This book identifies three processes at work in the apprehension
of objects in poetry, prose, visual arts, culture and crafts. If the first
instinct of the modernist novelists and playwrights was to object to the
realist tradition of objects as more or less stable inherited signifiers, they
felt themselves equally free, we find, to take up humanity as their object. The
human body, emotions and mind were endowed with newfound plasticity, and it was
now the artist’s and the writer’s task to fashion them after their own image,
mobilizing and expanding them through objects seen as relational and connective
catalysts for the modernist subject. Finally, the futile and decorative object
is explored. From Baroness Elsa performing the commodity fetish to Jean
Rhys performing the dissolution of the self in a frenzy of sartorial ornament,
the agency of surface detail (misplaced, proliferating, or repurposed) is made
manifest and given free play.