Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture Ser.: Abstraction in ...

Abstraction in Modernism and ModernityHuman and Inhuman\nAuthor(s): Jeff Wallace\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Edinburgh University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Edinburgh University Press\nISBN-13: 9781474461658, 978-1474461658\nSynopsis\nAbstraction is one of the most important words in modernism and in the critical thought of modernity, yet its complex work is invariably hidden in plain sight. What do we want from abstraction? Does it refer to thought, or to art? Is it a term of reproach, or of affirmation? Beyond these distinctions, Jeff Wallaces new intellectual history of abstraction in modernism and modernity proposes that abstraction is always uniquely concerned with the importance and revaluation of the inhuman in and for the human. Wallaces case studies range across the writings of Raymond Williams and Paul Valry, Marx and Marxist aesthetics, the discourse on abstract visual art in Czanne, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Newman, the literary experimentalisms of Gertrude Stein, Wa.