BOOK NEWS: Exploring Dada's roots in East-Central Europe

Cannibalizing the Canon: Dada Techniques in East-Central Europe

Edited by  Oliver A. I. Botar, Irina M. Denischenko, Gábor Dobó, and Merse Pál Szeredi

Brill, 2024

ISBN: 978-90-04-52673-0

https://brill.com/display/title/63526?language=en&contents=editorial-content

This rich, in-depth exploration of Dada’s roots in East-Central Europe is a vital addition to existing research on Dada and the avant-garde. Through deeply researched case studies and employing novel theoretical approaches, the volume rewrites the history of Dada as a story of cultural and political hybridity, border-crossings, transitions, and transgressions, across political, class and gender lines. Dismantling prevailing notions of Dada as a “Western” movement, the contributors to this volume present East-Central Europe as the locus of Dada activity and techniques. The articles explore how artists from the region pre-figured Dada as well as actively “cannibalized”, that is, reabsorbed and further hybridized, a range of avant-garde techniques, thus challenging “Western” cultural hegemony.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Cannibalizing the Canon has the merit of shedding light on under-researched territories and overlooked issues in avant-garde historiography, restoring the contributions of those artists who did not figure in the canonical constructions of Dadaism and incorporating ephemeral art forms. Using new theoretical approaches and methodological frameworks, the volume challenges the singularity of Dadaism and its founding myths. The focus on the connections between local avant-gardes, employing transmedial and transnational perspectives, corrects and nuances some directions from avant-garde histories, contesting the hegemony of the West and a hierarchical system. Thus, the volume brings a significant contribution to the Dada movement and to the research of the avant-garde.

Oliver Botar is a professor of art history and associate director of the School of Art at the University of Manitoba. His research focuses on early 20th-century Central European Modernism, particularly the work of Moholy-Nagy, with concentrations on art in alternative media, and “Biocentrism” and Modernism in early-to-mid 20th-century art.

Irina Denischenko is an assistant professor at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on twentieth-century literature and visual art--especially the avant-garde, on critical theory, as well as on women’s contributions to avant-garde and modernist aesthetics in Central and Eastern Europe.

Gábor Dobó is a research fellow at the Kassák Museum in Budapest. He is the principal investigator of a project focusing on the artist couple Lajos Kassák and Jolán Simon. In 2022, he was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Columbia University.

Merse Pál Szeredi is department head at the Kassák Museum. His research focuses on Hungarian avant-garde art and the history of Lajos Kassák’s magazine Ma in Vienna between 1920 and 1925, with special emphasis on its international networks.

BOOK NEWS: Jean-Luc Nancy's thought and aesthetic modernity

 Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism

EDITED BY COSMIN TOMA

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781501370144

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/understanding-nancy-understanding-modernism-9781501370144/

Over the past three decades, Jean-Luc Nancy has become one of the most celebrated contemporary philosophers. His remarkably diverse body of work, which deals with such topics as post-Heideggerian ontology, Christian painting, the experience of drunkenness, heart transplants, contemporary cinema and the problem of freedom, is entirely "immersed" in modernity, as he puts it. Within this plural framework, art – which he explicitly defines as a modern construct – plays a singular role in that it is the very prism through which he explores the problems of sense and feeling in general, particularly as they relate to “our” experience of modernity.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The contributors to Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism fully delve into the heretofore under-acknowledged and under-explored modernism of Nancy's writings on philosophy and the arts through close readings of his key works as well as broader essays on the relationship between his thought and aesthetic modernity. In addition to an interview with Nancy himself, a final section consists of an extended glossary of Nancy's signature terms, which will be a valuable resource for students and experts alike.

"This is a stunning collection that will be a priceless resource for readers of Nancy's work. The essays are ddply knowledgeable and together they chart remarkably clear paths through all the major features of Nancy's world and his thinking of 'world.'" --Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California

"The texts included here demonstrate in incisive ways not only how Nancy's writings open onto understanding modernity but also how questions of modernity offer new and compelling paths for reading Nancy. It is a wonderfully impressive volume." --Philip Armstrong, Ohio State University

Cosmin Toma is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, St Hugh's College, UK. He has primarily published on modern and contemporary French literature, critical theory, music, and aesthetics. His first book, Neutraliser l’absolu. Blanchot, Beckett et la chose littéraire (2019) is an inquiry into what remains of what Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe called “the literary absolute” when it is neutralized by modernity. He has also worked extensively as an academic translator.

Book News: The Nordic Avant Garde, 1925-50

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950

Edited by Benedikt Hjartarson, Andrea Kollnitz, Per Stounbjerg, and Tania Ørum

Brill, 2022

ISBN: 978-90-04-52011-0

https://brill.com/display/title/38041?language=en

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries in this period. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations: literature, visual arts, theatre, architecture and design, film, radio, body culture and magazines. It includes 138 color illustrations.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: the pre-war and wartime responses to international developments, the new cultural institutions, sexual politics, the impact of refugees and the new start after the war.

Of interest to teachers and students of modernism and the avant-garde, cultural studies, Scandinavian studies, art history, literature, cultural history, discourse and ideology of the interwar period.

Benedikt Hjartarson is professor of comparative literature and cultural studies at the University of Iceland. He has written and edited a number of books and articles on the European avant-garde, published in Icelandic, German, Danish, English and Swedish.

Andrea Kollnitz is associate professor of art history at Stockholm University. She has published a monograph on nationalist agendas in Swedish art criticism 1908-34 and edited a collection on Fashion and Modernism as well as published research on fashion caricatures, nationalist fashion and art discourses, the avant-garde artist’s role and artistic self-fashioning.

Per Stounbjerg is DPhil in Scandinavian literature and head of the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. He has published on August Strindberg, genre studies, avant-garde, modernism and the aesthetics of the ugly.

Tania Ørum is professor emerita at the University of Copenhagen. She has published monographs and articles on modernism and avant-garde and is general editor of the volumes of A Cultural History of the Avant Garde in the Nordic Countries, a subseries of Avant-Garde Critical Studies (Brill | Rodopi)

Book News: Tracing pataphysical experimentation from its origins to today

’Pataphysics Unrolled

EDITED BY KATIE L. PRICE AND MICHAEL R. TAYLOR

Penn State UP, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-271-08958-4

https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08958-4.html

In the 1890s, French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry founded pataphysics, the absurdist “science of imaginary solutions,” a concept that has been nominally recognized as the precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd, among other movements. Over a century after Jarry “made the gesture of dying,” Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor argue that it is time to take the comedic intervention of pataphysics seriously.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

’Pataphysics Unrolled collects critical and creative essays to create an unauthorized account of pataphysical experimentation from its origins in the late nineteenth century through the contemporary moment. Reaching beyond the geographic and cultural boundaries normally associated with pataphysics, this volume presents rich readings of pataphysical syzygy, traces the influence of pataphysics across disciplines and outside of coteries such as the Collège de ’Pataphysique, and asks fundamental questions about the field of modern and contemporary studies that challenge distinctions between the modern and the postmodern, high and low culture, the serious and the comic. Touching on disciplines such as literature, art, architecture, education, music, and technology, this book reveals how pataphysics has been a platform and medium for persistent intellectual, poetic, conceptual, and artistic experimentation for over a century.

In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Charles Bernstein, Marc Décimo, Adam Dickinson, Johanna Drucker, Craig Dworkin, Catherine Hansen, James Hendler, John Heon, Ted Hiebert, Andrew Hugill, Steve McCaffery, Seth McDowell, Jerome McGann, Anne M. Mulhall, Marcus O’Dair, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Orchid Tierney, and Brandon Walsh.

“Continuing and elaborating Alfred Jarry’s notion of ’pataphysics, this collection tracks ’pataphysics’ continued appearances and developments in ensuing avant-garde movements, modern and contemporary art, the intersections of art, literature, and science— and the far-reaching effects of pushing against normative logics and thinking in exceptional ways.” —Judith Roof, author of What Gender Is, What Gender Does

Katie L. Price is associate director at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, a codirector of the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium, and interviews editor at Jacket2. She is the author of the chapbook BRCA: Birth of a Patient.

Michael R. Taylor is the chief curator and deputy director for art and education at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He is the author of Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, and Thomas Chimes: Adventures in ’Pataphysics.

Book News: The "still life spirit" in modernism

 Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers

BY CLAUDIA TOBIN

Edinburgh UP, 2020

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-modernism-and-still-life.html

ISBN Hardback: 9781474455138

ISBN ePub: 9781474455169

ISBN PDF: 9781474455152

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterized as the ‘age of speed’ but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It ranges widely in its material, taking Cézanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do not constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

• Explores the ‘still life spirit’ in modern painting, prose, dance, sculpture and poetry
• Challenges the conventional positioning of still life as a ‘minor’ genre in art history
• Proposes a radical alternative to narratives of modernism that privilege speed and motion by revealing forms of stillness and still life at the heart of modern literature and visual culture
• Provides the first study of still life to consider the genre across modern literature, visual cultures and dance
• Uncovers connections and cultural exchange between networks of European and American artists including the Bloomsbury Group and Wallace Stevens

Modernism and Still Life reminds us that Modernism not only introduced new ways of making art but also new ways of looking at art. Tobin is alert to the paradoxes inherent in the title 'still life' but also to the many ways in which stillness and movement enter into conversation in early modernism. This is a work of deft scholarship and considerable originality of thought. It makes a fresh intervention into a major subject and deepens understanding, offering another landmark in the historiography of Modernism.

– Frances Spalding, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge

Claudia Tobin is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of Cambridge. She has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and the Huntington Library, California. She has published commissioned articles, scholarly book chapters, and exhibition catalogues on interdisciplinary topics including Virginia Woolf and still life, modernism and colour, and on Vanessa Bell's abstract painting as part of Tate's 'In Focus' series. She is General Editor, with Julian Bell, of Ways of Drawing, Thames & Hudson (2019).