Book News: Vertical ascension and growing anxiety in 20th century literature

 The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism

BY PAUL HAACKE

Oxford UP, 2021

ISBN: 9780198851448 hardback

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-vertical-imagination-and-the-crisis-of-transatlantic-modernism-9780198851448?cc=us&lang=en&#

From the invention of skyscrapers and airplanes to the development of the nuclear bomb, ideas about the modern increasingly revolved around vertiginous images of elevation and decline and new technologies of mobility and terror from above. In The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism, Paul Haacke examines this turn by focusing on discourses of aspiration, catastrophe, and power in major works of European and American literature as well as film, architecture, and intellectual and cultural history.

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This wide-ranging and pointed study begins with canonical fiction by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and John Dos Passos, as well as poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, and Aimé Césaire, before moving to critical reflections on the rise of New York City by architects and writers from Le Corbusier to Simone de Beauvoir, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and theories of cinematic space and time, and postwar novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among many other examples. In tracing the rise and fall of modernist discourse over the course of the long twentieth century, this book shows how visions of vertical ascension turned from established ideas about nature, the body, and religion to growing anxieties about aesthetic distinction, technological advancement, and American capitalism and empire. It argues that spectacles of height and flight became symbols and icons of ambition as well as direct indexes of power, and thus that the vertical transformation of modernity was both material and imagined, taking place at the same time through the rapidly expanding built environment and shifting ideological constructions of "high" and "low."

• Rethinks modernist discourse from the rise of the twentieth century to the post-1945 and post-9/11 periods
• Shows how technologies, ideologies, and metaphors of verticality became central for re-envisioning the meaning of modernity
• Develops a comparative approach to major and lesser-known works of European and American literature as well as intellectual and cultural history, architecture, and film
• Engages with inter-disciplinary work in critical theory, urban and environmental studies, film and media studies, transnationalism and empire, and new materialisms and secularisms
• Studies a wide range of authors including Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, Aimé Césaire, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko

Paul Haacke has taught at UC Berkeley, New York University, and the Pratt Institute. His academic writing has appeared in a range of publications, including diacritics, French Forum, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.