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Solid objects : modernism and the test of production

Author: Douglas Mao
Publisher: Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, ©1998.
Edition/Format:   Book : EnglishView all editions and formats
Summary:
"In this study, Douglas Mao argues that a profound tension between veneration of human production and anxiety about production's dangers lay at the heart of literary modernism. Focusing on the work of Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, Mao shows that modernists were captivated by physical objects which, regarded as objects, seemed to partake of a utopian serenity beyond the reach of human  Read more...
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Details

Material Type: Internet resource
Document Type: Book, Internet Resource
All Authors / Contributors: Douglas Mao
ISBN: 0691059268 9780691059266
OCLC Number: 38326297
Description: xii, 308 p. ; 24 cm.
Contents: Virginia Woolf --
Wyndham Lewis --
Ezra Pound --
Wallace Stevens.
Responsibility: Douglas Mao.
More information:

Abstract:

"In this study, Douglas Mao argues that a profound tension between veneration of human production and anxiety about production's dangers lay at the heart of literary modernism. Focusing on the work of Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, Mao shows that modernists were captivated by physical objects which, regarded as objects, seemed to partake of a utopian serenity beyond the reach of human ideological conflicts. Under a variety of historical pressures, Mao observes, these writers came to revere the making of such things, and especially the crafting of the work of art, as the surest guarantee of meaning for an individual life. Yet they also found troubling contradictions here, since any kind of making, be it handicraft or mass production, could also be understood as a violation of the nonhuman world by an increasingly predatory and imperialistic subjectivity. If modernists began by embracing production as a test of meaning, then, they frequently ended by testing production itself and finding it wanting."--Jacket.

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