Redefining the artistic movement that helped shape American modernism In the early decades of the twentieth century, a loose contingent of artists working in and around New York City gave rise to the aesthetic movement known as precisionism, primarily remembered for its exacting depictions of skyscrapers, factories, machine parts, and other symbols of a burgeoning modernity. Although often regarded as a singular group, these artists were remarkably varied in their subject matter and stylistic traits. Fantasies of Precision excavates the surprising ties that connected them, exploring notions of precision across philosophy, technology, medicine, and many other fields. Bookended by discussions of the landmark First Biennial Exhibition of Painting at the Whitney Museum in 1932, this study weaves together a series of interconnected chapters illuminating the careers of Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Demuth. Built on a theoretical framework of the writing of modernist poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, Fantasies of Precision outlines an “ethos of precision” that runs through the diverse practices of these artists, articulating how the broad range of enigmatic imagery they produced was underpinned by shared strategies of restraint, humility, and slowness. Questioning straightforward modes of art historical classification, Ashley Lazevnick redefines the concept that designated the precisionist movement. Through its cross-disciplinary approach and unique blend of historiography and fantasy, Fantasies of Precision offers a comprehensive reevaluation of one of the defining movements of artistic modernism.

In 1989, from East Berlin to Budapest and Bucharest to Moscow, communism was falling. The walls were coming down and the world was being changed in ways that seemed entirely new. The conflict of ideas and ideals that began with the French Revolution of 1789 culminated in these revolutions, which raised the prospects of the "return to Europe" of East and Central European nations, the "restarting of their history," even, for some, the "end of history." What such assertions and aspirations meant, and what the larger events that inspired them mean-not just for the world of history and politics, but for our very understanding of that world-are the questions Krishan Kumar explores in 1989. A well-known and widely respected scholar, Kumar places these revolutions of 1989 in the broadest framework of political and social thought, helping us see how certain ideas, traditions, and ideological developments influenced or accompanied these movements-and how they might continue to play out. Asking questions about some of the central dilemmas facing modern society in the new century, Kumar offers critical insight into how these questions might be answered and how political, social, and historical ideas and ideals can shape our destiny. Contradictions Series, volume 12

In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodied or disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define these identities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in a literally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the fantasy of identificationOCothe powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society. Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasy distorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language for claimed objective fact.From its early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slaves in the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question of sex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, a Fantasies of Identification aexplores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity."

The later Wittgenstein is notoriously hard to understand. His novel philosophical approach is the key to understanding his perplexing work. This volume assembles leading Wittgenstein scholars to come to grips with its least well understood aspect: the unfamiliar aims and method that shape Wittgenstein's approach. Wittgenstein at Work investigates Wittgenstein's aims, rationale and method in two steps. The first seven chapters analyze how he proceeds in core parts of the Philosophical Investigations: the discussion of the Augustinian picture of language, ostensive definition, philosophical method, understanding, rule-following, and private language. The final five chapters examine his most striking methodological remarks: his repudiation of theory and non-trivial theses, and some core notions of his methodology: his notions of clarification, synoptic representation, nonsense, and philosophical pictures. The volume considerably advances discussion of the therapeutic aspects of his approach that are currently a focus of debate. This volume is an indispensable methodological companion to the Philosophical Investigations, useful to both specialists and students alike.

A fresh look at a bold and dynamic 20th-century American art style Characterized by highly structured, geometric compositions with smooth surfaces, linear qualities, and lucid forms, Precisionism fully emerged after World War I and flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. This insightful publication, featuring more than 100 masterworks by artists such as Charles Sheeler, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Charles Demuth, sheds new light on the Precisionist aesthetic and the intellectual concerns, excitement, tensions, and ambivalences about industrialization that helped develop this important strand of early American modernism. Essays explore the origins of the style--which reconciled realism with abstraction and adapted European art movements like Purism, Cubism, and Futurism to American subject matter--as well as its relationship to photography, and the ways in which it reflected the economic and social changes brought about by industrialization and technology in the post-World War I world. In addition to making a meaningful contribution to the resurging interest in Modernism and its revisionist narratives, this book offers copious connections between the past and our present day, poised on the verge of a fourth industrial revolution. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in association with Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young (03/24/18-08/12/18) Dallas Museum of Art (09/16/18-01/06/19)

Since her death in 2003, Nina Simone has been the subject of an astonishing number of rereleased, remastered, and remixed albums and compilations as well as biographies, films, viral memes, samples, and soundtracks. In Fantasies of Nina Simone, Jordan Alexander Stein uses an archive of Simone’s performances, images, and writings to examine the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, civil rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself. Stein outlines how Simone gave voice to personal fantasies through releasing dozens of covers of her white male contemporaries. With her covers of George Harrison, the Bee Gees, Bob Dylan, and others, Simone explored and claimed the power and perspective that come with race and gender privilege. Looking at examples from Simone’s four-decade genre-bending career—from songbook standards, jazz, and pop to folk, junkanoo, and reggae—and at her work’s many uptakes and afterlives, Stein mobilizes the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to build a black feminist history with and for this multifaceted performing artist.

Born in Japan and trained in Germany, dancer and choreographer Ito Michio (1893–1961) achieved prominence in London before moving to the U.S. in 1916 and building a career as an internationally acclaimed artist. During World War II, Ito was interned for two years, and then repatriated to Japan, where he contributed to imperial war efforts by creating propaganda performances and performing revues for the occupying Allied Forces in Tokyo. Throughout, Ito continually invented stories of voyages made, artists befriended, performances seen, and political activities carried out—stories later dismissed as false. Fantasies of Ito Michio argues that these invented stories, unrealized projects, and questionable political affiliations are as fundamental to Ito’s career as his ‘real’ activities, helping us understand how he sustained himself across experiences of racialization, imperialism, war, and internment. Tara Rodman reveals a narrative of Ito’s life that foregrounds the fabricated and overlooked to highlight his involvement with Japanese artists, such as Yamada Kosaku and Ishii Baku, and global modernist movements. Rodman offers “fantasy” as a rubric for understanding how individuals such as Ito sustain themselves in periods of violent disruption and as a scholarly methodology for engaging the past.

The first history of keyboard improvisation in European music in the postclassical and romantic periods, Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music documents practices of improvisation on the piano and the organ, with a particular emphasis on free fantasies and other forms of free playing. Case studies of performers such as Abbé Vogler, J. N. Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, Robert Schumann, Carl Loewe, and Franz Liszt describe in detail the motives, intentions, and musical styles of the nineteenth century's leading improvisers. Grounded in primary sources, the book further discusses the reception and valuation of improvisational performances by colleagues, audiences, and critics, which prompted many keyboardists to stop improvising. Author Dana Gooley argues that amidst the decline of improvisational practices in the first half of the nineteenth century there emerged a strong and influential "idea" of improvisation as an ideal or perfect performance. This idea, spawned and nourished by romanticism, preserved the aesthetic, social, and ethical values associated with improvisation, calling into question the supposed triumph of the "work."

Writing and Fantasy brings together essays which restore a sense of the fantastic as a political response to cultural opportunities and pressures. It moves on from two conventional fields of discussion: the psychoanalytic, where phantasies are produced by the emergence of the consciousness, and the social, where fantasies are the production of nineteenth-century individualism. Chapters run from the classical period to the twentieth century, each focusing on a local reading of how fantasy acts as a strategy to contain or exploit specific historical and cultural moments. A wide variety of sites are investigated including the feminization of the wild west, originary and maternal spaces, highwaywomen, financial credit, and the ideal home. Multiple genres containing fantasy are explored, ranging from ghost stories to feminist utopias. Aids to the reader include an introduction summarising recent discussions of fantasy, illustrations dealing with visual fantasies, and an annotated bibliography. The new research presented here will be of great interest to academics and students in literature, history and cultural studies departments who are working in the field of the historical development of concepts of fantasy, cultural opposition, and the imbrication of politics and modes of representation.

In this original study, Gabriel Horowitz examines the work of select nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American writers through the lens of contemporary theoretical debates about nature, postcoloniality, and national identity. In the work of José Martí, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Jorge Luis Borges, Augusto Roa Bastos, Cesar Aira, and others, he traces historical constructions of nature in regional intellectual traditions and texts as they inform political culture on the broader global stage. By investigating national literary discourses from Cuba, Argentina, and Paraguay, he identifies a common narrative thread that imagines the utopian wilderness of the New World as a symbolic site of independence from Spain. In these texts, Horowitz argues, an expressed desire to return to the nation’s foundational nature contributed to a movement away from political and social engagement and toward a “biopolitical state,” in which nature, traditionally seen as pre-political, conversely becomes its center.