Anexact Form and Modernist Culture (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-garde Writing)

Reath, James

Edinburgh University Press（2025/07発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 312 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781399547499
• DDC分類 306.01

Full Description

What happens to form in a time of random walks and Uncertainty Principles, self-organising plasma membranes and multivalent logics? And how might we better categorise the modernist avant-garde's confrontation with such complex and contradictory formalisms? Anexact Form and Modernist Culture presents a soft taxonomy of the long mid-century avant-garde's fuzzy, grey, and viscous forms while investigating the aesthetic and affective valences of that which is 'essentially and not accidentally inexact', as Edmund Husserl writes in Ideas I (1913). Across five chapters on doodles and inkblots; iridescent surfaces and the noise of becoming; the erratic cultural life of precision; the mesomorphic imagination of protoplasm; and the groovy aesthetics of industrial chemistry Anexact Form and Modernist Culture offers a unique examination of avant-garde art and literature in a time of unprecedented err, smudge, ooze and wriggle.

Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

General Introduction: Here Comes Everything

Part I. The Fuzzy
Introduction: Welcome to Errorland
1. History of the Doodle: Pareidoliamania and the Cultural Logic of Squiggles and Inkblots
2. The Iridescent: Seven Types of Colour-Writing, Poikilos-
Mētis and the Surface of Surfaces

Part II. The Grey
Introduction: Untitled
3. After Exactitude: Idiometry and the Art of Mechanical Precision

Part III. The Viscous
Introduction: Abscess Sky Index
4. Plasmodial Form: Wortschleim and the Mesomorphic Imagination of Protoplasm
5. Theory of the Groovy: Latex, Jelly, Nylon, Ruthmos

Coda: On Floating Bodies

Selected Bibliography
Notes
Index