Abstract

Ellen Levy’s Criminal Ingenuity explores the struggle between poetry and painting in American art and aesthetics, 1915–1975, from the Age of Eliot to the Age of Pollock. With Moore, Cornell, and Ashbery, Levy thaws the boundaries between the arts frozen by institutional modernism and shows the two-way flow between internal wounds and external conflicts — dynamics at once ideological, sexual, and aesthetic. Levy finds solutions to hierarchical structures of power associated with Eliot and Greenberg in ambivalence, surrealism, and negative dialectics.

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