Anexact Form and Modernist Culture - (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing) by James Reath (Hardcover)

About the Book

Conducts the first genealogy of the philosophy of the anexact in twentieth century culture, introducing the concept as a means of understanding modernist avant-garde art and literature in the long mid-century (c. 1922-1972).

Book Synopsis

What happens to form in a time of random walks and Uncertainty Principles, self-organising plasma membranes and multivalent logics? And how might we better categorise the modernist avant-garde's confrontation with such complex and contradictory formalisms? Anexact Form and Modernist Culture presents a soft taxonomy of the long mid-century avant-garde's fuzzy, grey, and viscous forms while investigating the aesthetic and affective valences of that which is 'essentially and not accidentally inexact', as Edmund Husserl writes in Ideas I (1913). Across five chapters - on doodles and inkblots; iridescent surfaces and the noise of becoming; the erratic cultural life of precision; the mesomorphic imagination of protoplasm; and the groovy aesthetics of industrial chemistry - Anexact Form and Modernist Culture offers a unique examination of avant-garde art and literature in a time of unprecedented err, smudge, ooze and wriggle.

Review Quotes

With imagination and rigor, verve and flair, James Reath explores modernism's fondness for squiggling, oozing, grooving, dawdling, fuzzy, mesomorphic forms. Sensitive to the power of 'weak' forces, brilliantly attuned to the intersection of literature and science, Anexact Form and Modernist Culture is a delight.--Hannah Freed-Thall, New York University