Modernism and Affect

This book contains eleven original multi-disciplinary chapters – and one chapter-length introduction – that explore the affective dimensions of modernism. Modernism has often been characterized by its blunt opposition to both the kitsch sentimentality of mass culture and the expressive emotionality of Romanticism, and so its relationship to affective matters has historically been underexplored. The chapters in this book reconsider the complexity of modernist attitudes towards feeling in the light of theory’s turn to matters of embodiment, materiality, and affect. However, Modernism and Affect does not rely on a homogeneous theory of affect, but rather explores modernist feeling from a variety of theoretical and historical positions. While some chapters consider modernist texts alongside theorists associated with the recent upsurge of interest in affect, such as Brian Massumi, Giles Deleuze, and Sianne Ngai, others engage with longer histories of emotion, and find a wide range of models helpful in rethinking modernist feeling, including psychoanalysis, phenomenology, critical theory, and even the deconstructive linguistic philosophy with which the ‘affective turn’ has been opposed. Similarly, the chapters collectively understand ‘modernism’ in capacious terms, tracing the movement from its origins in the post-war period to its afterlives in the postwar period. The range of cultural products considered spans from the canonical to the marginal, and includes literature, architecture, philosophy, dance, visual art, and design.

Author(s):  
Mykola Stopchak

The article analyzes the historiographical achievements of Ukrainian foreign historians of the postwar period on the activities of government agencies of the UPR to raise the professional and cultural-educational level of Ukrainian interned soldiers. It is shown that the party confrontation, which continued within the Ukrainian political emigration and in the postwar period, complicated the coverage of the significant efforts of the State Center of the UPR led by S. Petliura to preserve the interned Army of the UPR, its comprehensive preparation for further struggle for state independence. However, historians of the postwar period have prepared a number of works in which these activities, including and its aspects, such as military-professional and cultural-educational work, were covered much more deeply and comprehensively than in the interwar period. It is noted that not all works covered the research problem to the same extent. In some of them, mostly in the memoirs of former participants of those events, as a rule, only certain aspects of it were briefly considered, and generalized conclusions were drawn. These are the publications of V. Sikevych, M. Staroviit, M. Levitsky, Y. Artyushenko, L. Kozar, and others. authors. This also applies to some works of a monographic nature devoted to the events of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917 – 1921 (I. Nagaevsky, L. Shankovsky, O. Udovychenko). The materials published in them on the problem are fragmentary, in fact, only outlining the directions of its further study. At the same time, the authors of some monographs (P. Fedenko), memoirs (P. Bilon, O. Semmo) departed from a simple and concise statement of well-known facts on the researched problem, presented a wide range of military-professional and cultural-educational work in camps for interned Ukrainian soldiers. It is emphasized that the lack of access to materials stored in Soviet archives, the use of former Taborites as sources of memories led to the appearance in the works of Ukrainian foreign historians of the postwar period of certain factual errors, inaccuracies, subjective assessments, which to some extent reduced their level.


Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson

The first book-length study in English of a national corpus of state-sponsored informational film, this book traces how Danish shorts on topics including social welfare, industry, art and architecture were commissioned, funded, produced and reviewed from the inter-war period to the 1960s. For three decades, state-sponsored short filmmaking educated Danish citizens, promoted Denmark to the world, and shaped the careers of renowned directors like Carl Th. Dreyer. Examining the life cycle of a representative selection of films, and discussing their preservation and mediation in the digital age, this book presents a detailed case study of how informational cinema is shaped by, and indeed shapes, its cultural, political and technological contexts.The book combines close textual analysis of a broad range of films with detailed accounts of their commissioning, production, distribution and reception in Denmark and abroad, drawing on Actor-Network Theory to emphasise the role of a wide range of entities in these processes. It considers a broad range of genres and sub-genres, including industrial process films, public information films, art films, the city symphony, the essay film, and many more. It also maps international networks of informational and documentary films in the post-war period, and explores the role of informational film in Danish cultural and political history.


Author(s):  
Billie Melman

Empires of Antiquities is a history of the rediscovery of the imperial civilizations of the ancient Near East in a modern imperial order that evolved between the outbreak of the First World War and the decolonization of the British Empire in the 1950s. It explores the ways in which near eastern antiquity was redefined and experienced, becoming the subject of imperial regulation, modes of enquiry, and international and national politics. A series of globally publicized spectacular archaeological discoveries in Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, which the book follows, made antiquity material visible and accessible as never before. The book demonstrates that the new definition and uses of antiquity and their relations to modernity were inseparable from the emergence of the post-war international imperial order, transnational collaboration and crises, the aspirations of national groups, and collisions between them and the British mandatories. It uniquely combines a history of the internationalization of archaeology and the rise of a new “regime of antiquities” under the oversight of the League of Nations and its institutions, a history of British attitudes to, and passion for, near eastern antiquity and on-the-ground colonial policies and mechanisms, as well as nationalist claims on the past. It points to the centrality of the new mandate system, particularly mandates classified A in Mesopotamia/Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan, formerly governed by the Ottoman Empire, and of Egypt, in the new archaeological regime. Drawing on an unusually wide range of materials collected in archives in six countries, as well as on material and visual evidence, the book weaves together imperial, international, and national histories, and the history of archaeological discovery which it connects to imperial modernity.


Author(s):  
Andrea Harris

This chapter explores the international and interdisciplinary backdrop of Lincoln Kirstein’s efforts to form an American ballet in the early 1930s. The political, economic, and cultural conditions of the Depression reinvigorated the search for an “American” culture. In this context, new openings for a modernist theory of ballet were created as intellectuals and artists from a wide range of disciplines endeavored to define the role of the arts in protecting against the dangerous effects of mass culture. Chapter 1 sheds new light on well-known critical debates in dance history between Kirstein and John Martin over whether ballet, with its European roots, could truly become “American” in contrast to modern dance. Was American dance going to be conceived in nationalist or transnationalist terms? That was the deeper conflict that underlay the ballet vs. modern dance debates of the early 1930s.


Author(s):  
John Joseph Norris ◽  
Richard D. Sawyer

This chapter summarizes the advancement of duoethnography throughout its fifteen-year history, employing examples from a variety of topics in education and social justice to provide a wide range of approaches that one may take when conducting a duoethnography. A checklist articulates what its cofounders consider the core elements of duoethnographies, additional features that may or may not be employed and how some studies purporting to be duoethnographies may not be so. The chapter indicates connections between duoethnography and a number of methodological concepts including the third space, the problematics of representation, feminist inquiry, and critical theory using published examples by several duoethnographers.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID BRYDAN

AbstractMany of the forms and practices of interwar internationalism were recreated under the auspices of the Nazi ‘New Europe’. This article will examine these forms of ‘Axis internationalism’ by looking at Spanish health experts' involvement with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Despite the ambiguous relationship between the Franco regime and the Axis powers, a wide range of Spanish health experts formed close ties with colleagues from Nazi Germany and across Axis and occupied Europe. Many of those involved were relatively conservative figures who also worked with liberal international health organisations in the pre- and post-war eras. Despite their political differences, their opposing attitudes towards eugenics and the tensions caused by German hegemony, Spanish experts were able to rationalise their involvement with Nazi Germany as a mutually-beneficial continuation of pre-war international health cooperation amongst countries united by a shared commitment to modern, ‘totalitarian’ forms of public health. Despite the hostility of Nazi Germany and its European collaborators to both liberal and left-wing forms of internationalism, this phenomenon suggests that the ‘New Europe’ deserves to be studied as part of the wider history of internationalism in general and of international health in particular.


Modern Italy ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Gundle

SummaryThe problem of the legitimacy or otherwise of the Resistance tradition in post-war Italy has been addressed in recent years mainly in terms of the role of the partisan struggle and its political legacy. This article aims to assess the tradition in terms of commemorative practices, rituals, artistic representations and monuments. It seeks to evaluate whether the Resistance gave rise to a civic religion that may be compared to those which existed in the Liberal period, based on the heroic struggles and figures of the Risorgimento, and the Fascist period, which drew on the feelings of loss and injustice that followed the First World War. It is argued that, although the Resistance lacked, prior to the 1960s, a high degree of official sponsorship, it did acquire some of the features of a civic religion. Its appeal was mainly limited to the regions administered by the Left which had seen a significant degree of Resistance activity in 1943-5. Even here, however, it was difficult to sustain the tradition as a key feature of community life during and after the economic boom: the eclipse of public culture, the decline of public mourning and the development of commercial leisure and mass culture all served to deprive it of meaning. Although intellectuals, politicians and ex-partisans reacted to this situation, the visual and rhetorical languages associated with the commemoration of the Resistance became increasingly divorced from everyday life and dominant social values.


Author(s):  
Inta Klāsone ◽  
Solvita Spirģe-Sēne

Nowadays, various forms of visual art have brought closer people’s daily lives to the processes that occur in the society. At the same time, the visually fulfilled environment has created favourable conditions for misunderstanding the contexts and meanings of artworks. This article draws attention to the fact that dialogue with visual art can be an important tool for developing personal values and promoting the spiritual understanding of a cultural environment. The topicality of the issue is supported by the educational trends of the 21st century – to educate comprehensive people who are capable of doing a wide range of tasks, constantly continuing their learning and development. Art plays an initiator’s role in social life and it encompasses all spiritual realms of humanity, which cannot be accomplished by other forms of public consciousness. A work of art can be viewed as a multi-layered expression of thoughts in an artistic form of images and symbols. The artist's work means producing a coded text or message. This article includes insights of scholars and artists developing an understanding of the artist’s work and artworks in a cultural and historical context to enrich the individual's competence base, and examples of the work and beliefs of particular artists of the 21st century.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 564-575
Author(s):  
Irina I. Rutsinskaya

An artist who finds themselves in the last days of a war in the enemy’s defeated capital may not just fix its objects dispassionately. Many factors influence the selection and depicturing manner of the objects. One of the factors is satisfaction from the accomplished retribution, awareness of the historical justice triumph. Researchers think such reactions are inevitable. The article offers to consider from this point of view the drawings created by Soviet artists in Berlin in the spring and summer of 1945. Such an analysis of the German capital’s visual image is conducted for the first time. It shows that the above reactions were not the only ones. The graphics of the first post-war days no less clearly and consistently express other feelings and intentions of their authors: the desire to accurately document and fix the image of the city and some of its structures in history, the happiness from the silence of peace, and the simple interest in the monuments of European art.The article examines Berlin scenes as evidences of the transition from front-line graphics focused on the visual recording of the war traces to peacetime graphics; from documentary — to artistry; from the worldview of a person at war — to the one of a person who lived to victory. In this approach, it has been important to consider the graphic images of Berlin in unity with the diary and memoir texts belonging to both artists and ordinary soldiers who participated in the storming of Berlin. The combination of verbal and visual sources helps to present the German capital’s image that existed in the public consciousness, as well as the specificity of its representation by means of visual art.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Pantaleo

Abstract A paucity of research has been conducted with learners in elementary classrooms on both the use of and the student creation of science comics. During the classroom-based research featured in this article, Grade 4 students designed ocean threat comics for the culminating activity of an interdisciplinary Ocean Literacy unit, one component of a larger study. Throughout the research, the students were afforded with opportunities to develop their visual meaning-making skills and competences, as well as their aesthetic understanding of and critical thinking about multimodal ensembles through participation in activities that focused on various elements of visual art and design, and conventions of the medium of comics. The visual and descriptive analysis of one student’s ocean threat comics, which includes excerpts from the interview about her work, reveals her motivations for selecting and orchestrating specific semiotic resources to represent and express particular meanings that realized her objectives as a sign-maker. Overall, the descriptions of the pedagogy featured during the research and the student’s ocean threat comics demonstrate how the development of student knowledge about elements of visual art and design, and conventions of the medium of comics can inform and deepen students’ semiotic work of comprehending, interpreting and designing science comics.


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