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In The Difficulties of Modernism, Leonard Diepeveen examines how difficulty became central to our encounters with modern literature and culture. Literary modernism's first readers often complained that difficulty was 'running rampant in literature', that art had become a 'plague of unintelligibilty'. Diepeveen argues that the simultaneous appearance of modernism and discussion about difficulty was not coincidental-difficulty allowed modernism to rise to the status of high art and it was fundamental to how modernism shaped the canon not only of twentieth-century literature, but of the literature that preceded it. He argues that modernism can be best understood as the moment when knowing how to manoeuver through difficult art became the central sign of one's ability to participate in high culture.
In The Difficulties of Modernism, Leonard Diepeveen examines how difficulty became central to our encounters with modern literature and culture. Literary modernism's first readers often complained that difficulty was 'running rampant in literature', that art had become a 'plague of unintelligibilty'. Diepeveen argues that the simultaneous appearance of modernism and discussion about difficulty was not coincidental-difficulty allowed modernism to rise to the status of high art and it was fundamental to how modernism shaped the canon not only of twentieth-century literature, but of the literature that preceded it. He argues that modernism can be best understood as the moment when knowing how to manoeuver through difficult art became the central sign of one's ability to participate in high culture.
Shiny Things combines an interest in visual art with a broad
attention to popular culture - the wideness of its range is
striking. It is more than just an expansion of subject matter,
which many of today's innovative books also have - it considers how
a specific physical property manifests itself in both art and
culture at large, and contributes to an analysis of and polemics
about the world. It is accessibly written but with a careful
application of contemporary theory. Interesting, informative, and
entertaining, this will appeal to progressive thinkers looking for
new ways of presenting ideas. This is scholarship that challenges
stale thought and interacts with philosophical ideas in real time,
with a versatility that can often be lacking in traditional
academic scholarship. Using art, especially contemporary art, as
its recurrent point of reference, the authors argue that shininess
has moved from a time when rarity gave shiny things a direct
meaning of power and transcendence. Shininess today is pervasive;
its attraction is a foundation of consumer culture with its
attendant effects on our architecture, our conceptions of the body,
and our production of spectacle. Power and the sacred as readings
of the shiny have given way to readings of superficiality, irony
and anxiety, while somehow shininess has maintained its qualities
of fascination, newness and cleanliness. Examines the meanings and
functions of shininess in art and in culture more generally: its
contradictions of both preciousness and superficiality, and its
complexities of representation; the way shininess itself is
physically and metaphorically present in the construction of major
conceptual categories such as hygiene, utopias, the sublime and
camp; and the way the affects of shininess, rooted in its inherent
disorienting excess, produce irony, anxiety, pleasure, kitsch, and
fetishism. All of these large ideas are embodied in the instantly
noticeable, sometimes precious and sometimes cheap physical
presence of shiny things, those things that catch our eye and
divert our attention. Shininess, then, is a compelling subject that
instantly attracts and fascinates people. The book engages
primarily with visual art, although it makes frequent use of
material culture, as well as advertising, film, literature, and
other areas of popular and political culture. The art world,
however, is a place where many of the affects of shininess come
into clearest focus, where the polemical semiotics of shine are
most evident and consciously explored. Artists as diverse as Anish
Kapoor (whose popular Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago is a
repeating example in the book), Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons,
Carolee Schneemann, Audrey Flack, Fra Angelico and Gerard ter Borch
centre the book in an art discourse that opens up to automobiles,
Richard Nixon and Liberace. Will be relevant to academics, scholars
and students with an interest in contemporary theory and material
and popular cultures. Potential interest across the humanities:
philosophy, gender studies, perhaps public relations, advertising
and marketing. It will also appeal to more general readers with an
interest in popular and material cultures, art and aesthetics. It
is written in a genuinely accessible style, and its ideas and
theory are embodied through examples and narratives. Will be of
interest to readers of Oliver Sacks, James Gleick, George Lakoff,
James Elkins or Rebecca Solnit.
The first publisher of Tender Buttons described the book's effect
on readers as "something like terror, there are no known precedents
to cling to." Written in pencil in a small notebook and barely
revised after its first composition, the text caused a sensation
and was widely reviewed and discussed on its publication. This
edition of Gertrude Stein's transformative work immerses the text
in its cultural context. The most opaque of modernist texts, Tender
Buttons also had modernism's most voluminous and varied response.
This Broadview Edition uses the response to Tender Buttons as a way
of understanding this spectacular moment in publishing history.
Stein's text is published alongside its parodies, defenses,
publicity brochure, and selections from the hundreds of responses
to it in American daily newspapers, which placed it in the context
of Cubism, fashion shows, and celebrity culture.
How was the modernist movement understood by the general public
when it was first emerging? This question can be addressed by
looking at how modernist literature and art were interpreted by
journalists in daily newspapers, mainstream magazines like Punch
and Vanity Fair, and literary magazines. In the earliest decades of
the movement - before modernist artists were considered important,
and before modernism's meaning was clearly understood - many of
these interpretations took the form of parodies. Mock Modernism is
an anthology of these amusing pieces, the overwhelming majority of
which have not been in print since the first decades of the
twentieth century. They include Max Beerbohm's send-up of Henry
James; J.C. Squire's account of how a poet, writing deliberately
incomprehensible poetry as a hoax, became the poet laureate of the
British Bolshevist Revolution; and the Chicago Record-Herald's
account of some art students' "trial" of Henri Matisse for "crimes
against anatomy." An introduction and headnotes by Leonard
Diepeveen highlight the usefulness of these pieces for
comprehending media and public perceptions of a form of art that
would later develop an almost unassailable power.
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