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Dynamic Form
How Intermediality Made Modernism
Cara L. Lewis (Author)
9781501749179
Hardback, published 15 July 2020
330 pages, 28 b&w halftones - 28 Halftones, black and white
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.8 cm, 0.907 kg
One of the delights of this monograph is its omnivorous intermediality. Those interested in the interweaving of literary, artistic, and cultural disciplines through modernism will find this study interesting not only for its scope, but for the questions it throws up about a future of modernist studies which attends equally to the different strains of criticism that have shaped the field.
Dynamic Form traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Cara Lewis examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as Lewis writes, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment. As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, this book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. Dynamic Form thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.
Introduction: Reformulating Modernism
1. Plastic Form: Henry James's Sculptural Aesthetics and Reading in the Round
2. Mortal Form: Still Life and Virginia Woolf 's Other Elegiac Shapes
3. Protean Form: Erotic Abstraction and Ardent Futurity in the Poetry of Mina Loy
4. Bad Formalism: Evelyn Waugh's Film Fictions and the Work of Art in the Age of Cinemechanics
5. Surface Forms: Photography and Gertrude Stein's Contact History of Modernism
Epilogue: The Consolations of Form