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Cold Modernism : Literature, Fashion, Art - Jessica Burstein

Cold Modernism

Literature, Fashion, Art

By: Jessica Burstein

Paperback | 14 October 2012

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Paperback


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In Cold Modernism, Jessica Burstein explores various cultural facets of modernism, tying them into a fresh conceptual framework. Central to her analysis is the important premise that our current understanding of modernism is fundamentally incomplete. Reacting against "hot," libidinous, and psychology-centered modernism, Burstein asserts that "a constellation of modernist sensibility" has been left unacknowledged, one that laid the essential groundwork for postmodernism.

In her wide-ranging discussion of fiction, poetry, art, and fashion, Burstein sets up the parameters of what she calls "cold modernism." According to Burstein, cold modernism operates on the premise that "there is a world in which the mind does not exist, let alone matter"; it runs counter to the "tropical bodies" of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Basing the core of her analysis on the written works of Wyndham Lewis, Burstein views varying disciplines within modernism through the lens of their human interest, focusing on the "coldest": works that convey the mechanical and inhuman. In these works, she contends, the role of the self is nonexistent, and the individual mind is merely a physical fact.

Cold Modernism raises questions fundamental to the understanding of modernist and postmodernist written and visual culture and is destined to become essential reading in the field.

Industry Reviews

“At its considerable best, Burstein’s book makes a major claim on our attention as a lunar Baedeker to the dark side of modernism. It is a tightly argued and original case for considering literature, fine art, and manufactured objects together, and it helps one to understand how ahumanism might reflect the relationship between consciousness and individuality on one hand and the very idea of humanism on the other. Burstein’s book should help bring her obdurately ahuman aesthetic and commercial subjects to further critical attention. It may seem paradoxical to say this, but never mind: however chilly, artificial, and (in the best sense) superficial its subject matter, Cold Modernism deserves a warm welcome.”

—Scott W. Klein, Modernism/Modernity

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