Modernist Invention attends to the parallel histories of media technology and modernist American poetry.

In Modernism and Subjectivity: How Modernist Fiction Invented the Postmodern Subject, Adam Meehan argues that theories of subjectivity coming out of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and adjacent late-twentieth-century intellectual traditions had already been articulated in modernist fiction before 1945. Offering a bold new genealogy for literary modernism, Meehan finds versions of a postmodern subject embodied in works by authors who intently undermine attempts to stabilize conceptions of identity and who draw attention to the role of language in shaping conceptions of the self. Focusing on the philosophical registers of literary texts, Meehan traces the development of modernist attitudes toward subjectivity, particularly in relation to issues of ideology, spatiality, and violence. His analysis explores a selection of works published between 1904 and 1941, beginning with Joseph Conrad’s prescient portrait of the subject interpolated by ideology and culminating with Samuel Beckett’s categorical disavowal of the subjective “I.” Additional close readings of novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Nathanael West, and Virginia Woolf establish that modernist texts conceptualize subjectivity as an ideological and linguistic construction that reverberates across understandings of consciousness, race, place, and identity. By reconsidering the movement’s function and scope, Modernism and Subjectivity charts how profoundly modernist literature shaped the intellectual climate of the twentieth century.

DIVArgues that the writers of the 30s and 40s--Hemingway, Ayn Rand, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, Wallace Stevens et al. -- identified and understood the formal problems of literary modernism through an idea of the social and an idiom of s/div

The Modernist World is an accessible yet cutting edge volume which redraws the boundaries and connections among interdisciplinary and transnational modernisms. The 61 new essays address literature, visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music, film, and intellectual currents. The book also examines modernist histories and practices around the globe, including East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the Arab World, as well as the United States and Canada. A detailed introduction provides an overview of the scholarly terrain, and highlights different themes and concerns that emerge in the volume. The Modernist World is essential reading for those new to the subject as well as more advanced scholars in the area – offering clear introductions alongside new and refreshing insights.

A History of the Modernist Novel reassesses the modernist canon and produces a wealth of new comparative analyses that radically revise the novel's history. Drawing on American, English, Irish, Russian, French and German traditions, leading scholars challenge existing attitudes about realism and modernism and draw new attention to everyday life and everyday objects. In addition to its exploration of new forms such as the modernist genre novel and experimental historical novel, this book considers the novel in postcolonial, transnational and cosmopolitan contexts. A History of the Modernist Novel also considers the novel's global reach while suggesting that the epoch of modernism is not yet finished.

In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius develops a radically new theoretical and historical understanding of high modernism. The author closely analyzes Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and James Joyce's Ulysses as narratives of the sweeping changes that affected high and low culture in the age of technological reproduction. In her discussion of the years from 1880 to 1930, Danius proposes that the high-modernist aesthetic is inseparable from a technologically mediated crisis of the senses. She reveals the ways in which categories of perceiving and knowing are realigned when technological devices are capable of reproducing sense data. Sparked by innovations such as chronophotography, phonography, radiography, cinematography, and technologies of speed, this sudden shift in perceptual abilities had an effect on all arts of the time.Danius explores how perception, notably sight and hearing, is staged in the three most significant modern novels in German, French, and British literature. The Senses of Modernism connects technological change and formal innovation to transform the study of modernist aesthetics. Danius questions the longstanding acceptance of a binary relationship between high and low culture and describes the complicated relationship between modernism and technology, challenging the conceptual divide between a technological culture and a more properly aesthetic one.

Introduction / Lyle Massey and James Nisbet -- Desolate dreams / Joseph Masco -- Air, wind, breath, life : desertification and Will Wilson's AIR (Auto-Immune Response) / Jessica L. Horton -- Notes from bioteknika / Albert Narath -- Troglodyte modernists / Lyle Massey -- Explosive modernism : Hiram Hudson Benedict's Bouldereign and Zabriskie Point at 50 / Edward Dimendberg -- Point Omega/Omega Point : desert In three parts / Stefanie Sobelle -- The desert in fine grain / Emily Eliza Scott -- The desert as black mythology / Bridget R. Cooks -- On the recalcitrance of the desert island, by way of Andrea Zittel's A-Z West / James Nisbet -- Four theses for the coming deserts / Hans Baumann and Karen Pinkus.

From Henry James' fascination with burnt manuscripts to destroyed books in the fiction of the Blitz; from junk mail in the work of Elizabeth Bowen to bureaucratic paperwork in Vladimir Nabokov; modern fiction is littered with images of tattered and useless paper that reveal an increasingly uneasy relationship between literature and its own materials over the course of the twentieth-century. Wastepaper Modernism argues that these images are vital to our understanding of modernism, disclosing an anxiety about textual matter that lurks behind the desire for radically different modes of communication. At the same time that writers were becoming infatuated with new technologies like the cinema and the radio, they were also being haunted by their own pages. Having its roots in the late-nineteenth century, but finding its fullest constellation in the wake of the high modernist experimentation with novelistic form, "wastepaper modernism" arises when fiction imagines its own processes of transmission and representation breaking down. When the descriptive capabilities of the novel exhaust themselves, the wastepaper modernists picture instead the physical decay of the book's own primary matter. Bringing together book history and media theory with detailed close reading, Wastepaper Modernism reveals modernist literature's dark sense of itself as a ruin in the making.

Written by an author with plenty of experience holding a scalpel, Dr. David Schneider’s The Invention of Surgery is an in-depth biography of the practice that has leapt forward over the centuries from the dangerous guesswork of ancient Greek physicians through the world-changing developments of anesthesia and antiseptic operating rooms to the “implant revolution” of the twentieth century.The Invention of Surgery is history of surgery that explains this dramatic, world-changing progress and highlights the personalities of the discipline's most dynamic historical figures. It links together the lives of the pioneering scientists who first understood what causes disease and how surgery could powerfully intercede in people’s lives, and then shows how the rise of surgery intersected with many of the greatest medical breakthroughs of the last century. And as Schneider argues, surgery has not finished transforming; new technologies are constantly reinventing both the practice of surgery and the nature of the objects we are permanently implanting in our bodies. Schneider considers these latest developments, asking “What’s next?” and analyzing how our conception of surgery has changed alongside our evolving ideas of medicine, technology, and our bodies.

A wide-ranging response to The Rhetoric of Fiction.