In this Book
- The Forces of Form in German Modernism
- Book
- 2018
- Published by: Northwestern University Press
summary
The Forces of Form in German Modernism charts a modern history of form as emergent from force. Offering a provocative alternative to the imagery of crisis and estrangement that has preoccupied scholarship on modernism, Malika Maskarinec shows that German modernism conceives of human bodies and aesthetic objects as shaped by a contest of conflicting and reciprocally intensifying forces: the force of gravity and a self-determining will to form. Maskarinec thereby discloses, for the first time, German modernism's sustained preoccupation with classical mechanics and with how human bodies and artworks resist gravity.
Considering canonical artists such as Rodin and Klee, seminal authors such as Kafka and Döblin, and largely neglected thinkers in aesthetics and art history such as those associated with Empathy Aesthetics, Maskarinec unpacks the manifold anthropological and aesthetic concerns and historical lineage embedded in the idea of form as the precarious achievement of uprightness.
The Forces of Form in German Modernism makes a decisive contribution to our understanding of modernism and to contemporary discussions about form, empathy, materiality, and human embodiment.
Considering canonical artists such as Rodin and Klee, seminal authors such as Kafka and Döblin, and largely neglected thinkers in aesthetics and art history such as those associated with Empathy Aesthetics, Maskarinec unpacks the manifold anthropological and aesthetic concerns and historical lineage embedded in the idea of form as the precarious achievement of uprightness.
The Forces of Form in German Modernism makes a decisive contribution to our understanding of modernism and to contemporary discussions about form, empathy, materiality, and human embodiment.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Title Page, Copyright Page
- pp. i-vi
- List of Illustrations
- pp. ix-x
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xi-2
- Introduction
- pp. 3-14
- Part I. An Aesthetics of Heaviness
- pp. 15-16
- Part II. Empathy and Abstraction
- pp. 57-58
- Part III. Poetic Gravity
- pp. 107-108
- Chapter 5. Kafka’s Kinetics
- pp. 109-128
- Bibliography
- pp. 201-214
Additional Information
ISBN
9780810137714
Related ISBN(s)
9780810137691, 9780810137707
MARC Record
OCLC
1048923175
Pages
240
Launched on MUSE
2018-09-23
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2018