DArcy Michael - The contemporaneity of modernism: literature, media, culture

At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms, and positions that defined modernism are crucially relevant to the condition of contemporary art and culture. The volume is attuned to the central concerns of recent scholarship on modernism and contemporary culture: the problems of aesthetic autonomy and the specific role of art in preserving a critical standpoint for cultural production; the relationship between politics and the category of the aesthetic; the problems of temporality and contemporaneity; literary transnationalism; and the questions of medium and medium specificity. Ranging across art forms, mediums, disciplines, and geographical locations, essays address the foundational questions that fuse modernism and the contemporary moment: What is art? What is the relation between art and the economy? How do art and technology interpenetrate and transform each other? What is modernisms logic of time and contemporaneity, and how might it speak to the problem of thinking genuine novelty, or the possibility of an alternative to the current stage of neo-liberal capitalism? What is modernism, and what is its history? The book is thus committed to revising our understanding of what modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and in accounting for the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernisms afterlives and reverberations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume includes essays that consider literature, sociology, philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture, television, and other artistic media. It synthesizes the most recent thinking on modernism and contemporary culture and presents a compelling case for what happens to literature, art, and culture in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism. This book will be of interest to those studying literature, visual art, media studies, architecture, literary theory, modernism, and twentieth-century and contemporary culture more generally.

Michael DArcy is Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada.

Mathias Nilges is Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

33 Representations of War, Migration, and Refugeehood
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Edited by Daniel H. Rellstab and Christiane Schlote

34 Liminality and the Short Story
Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing
Edited by Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann

35 Asian American Literature and the Environment
Edited by Lorna Fitzsimmons, Youngsuk Chae, and Bella Adams

36 Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture
Basuli Deb

37 Childrens Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation Narratives of Civilization and Wilderness
Layla AbdelRahim

38 Singularity and Transnational Poetics
Edited by Birgit Mara Kaiser

39 National Poetry, Empires and War
David Aberbach

40 Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture Technogothics
Edited by Justin D. Edwards

41 Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities Postcolonial Approaches
Edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan

42 Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth-Century Humanities Literary Theory, History, Philosophy
Edited by Marina Grishakova and Silvi Salupere

43 Gender, Race, and American Science Fiction
Reflections on Fantastic Identities
Jason Haslam

44 Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature The Architectural Void
Patricia Garca

45 New Directions in 21st-Century Gothic
The Gothic Compass
Edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien

46 Latin American and Iberian Perspectives on Literature and Medicine
Edited by Patricia NovilloCorvaln

47 Institutions of World Literature
Writing, Translation, Markets
Edited by Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen

48 Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds
Edited by Mari Hatavara, Matti Hyvrinen, Maria Mkel, and Frans Myr

49 Women Writers and the Occult in Literature and Culture Female Lucifers, Priestesses, and Witches
Miriam Wallraven

50 Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America
Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era
Edited by Matthew Bush and Tania Gentic

51 Race and Popular Fantasy Literature
Habits of Whiteness
Helen Young

52 Subjectivity and the Reproduction of Imperial Power
Empires Individuals
Daniel F. Silva

53 Ireland and Ecocriticism
Literature, History and Environmental Justice
Ein Flannery

54 Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture
Modern and Contemporary Perspectives
Edited by Jeffrey Clapp and Emily Ridge

55 New Perspectives on Detective Fiction
Mystery Magnified
Edited by Casey A. Cothran and Mercy Cannon

56 Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture
Alexandra Schultheis Moore

57 Globalizing Literary Genres
Literature, History, Modernity
Edited by Jernej Habjan and Fabienne Imlinger

58 War Gothic in Literature and Culture
Edited by Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Steffen Hantke

59 Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature
Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman
Heike Hartung

60 Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture The Americas
Edited by Justin D Edwards and Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos

61 The Contemporaneity of Modernism
Literature, Media, Culture
Edited by Michael DArcy and Mathias Nilges

First published 2016
by Routledge
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2016 Taylor & Francis

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The contemporaneity of modernism: literature, media, culture / edited by
Michael DArcy and Mathias Nilges.
pages cm. (Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature; 56)