Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art
Nico Israel
Abstract
This book reveals how spirals are at the heart of the most significant literature and visual art of the twentieth century. Juxtaposing the work of writers and artists—including W. B. Yeats and Vladimir Tatlin, James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett and Robert Smithson—the book argues that spirals provide a crucial frame for understanding the mutual involvement of modernity, history, and geopolitics, complicating the spatio-temporal logic of literary and artistic genres and of scholarly disciplines. The book takes the spiral not only as its topic but as its method. Drawing on the wr ... More
This book reveals how spirals are at the heart of the most significant literature and visual art of the twentieth century. Juxtaposing the work of writers and artists—including W. B. Yeats and Vladimir Tatlin, James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett and Robert Smithson—the book argues that spirals provide a crucial frame for understanding the mutual involvement of modernity, history, and geopolitics, complicating the spatio-temporal logic of literary and artistic genres and of scholarly disciplines. The book takes the spiral not only as its topic but as its method. Drawing on the writings of Walter Benjamin and Alain Badiou, it theorizes a way of reading spirals, responding to their dual-directionality as well as their affective power. The sensations associated with spirals—flying, falling, drowning, being smothered—reflect the anxieties of limits tested or breached, and the book charts these limits as they widen from the local to the global and recoil back. Chapters mix literary and art history to explore 'pataphysics, Futurism, Vorticism, Dada and Surrealism, “Concentrisme,” minimalism, and entropic earth art; a coda considers the work of novelist W. G. Sebald and contemporary artist William Kentridge.
Keywords:
spirals,
modernity,
literary history,
art history,
'pataphysics,
Futurism,
Vorticism,
Surrealism,
minimalism,
entropic earth art
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780231153027 |
| Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231153027.001.0001 |
