History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism

by Jed Rasula

Overview

An abrupt break in the prevailing modes of artistic expression, for many, marks the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century, but revisionary attempts to pin down a precise moment of its emergence remain disputed. History of a Shiver proffers a different approach, tracing the first inkling of modernism instead to the nineteenth century's fascination with music. As Jed Rasula deftly shows, melomania--the passion for music--gave rise to concepts like Richard Wagner's "endless melody" and the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, which in turn infused the arts of the fin de siècle with an aura of expectancy, challenging them to induce musical effects by their own means. With each art aspiring to produce the effects of another artistic medium, a synesthetic yearning ran like a shiver through the body of art that would emerge over the next half century. Rasula traces this pan-arts polyphony from German Romantic theory to early experiments in "visual music," encompassing such diverse phenomena as American fixation on Arcadia, early film theory, and the lure of the fourth dimension. All the while, he keeps focus on the paramount historical consequence in elevating music to a new universal aesthetic standard, arguing that Wagnerism was first among modern "isms." In surveying this momentous interplay among arts, History of a Shiver ranges from literature, music and painting to theatre, cinema, dance, photography, and civic pageantry. It retells the story of modernism by recovering not an idea, but a feeling--the hair-raising potential for each painting, literary text, or musical composition to herald an unprecedented domain of human enterprise.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199396313
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/26/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Jed Rasula is Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century, Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth, and Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry, among others.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents Preface: The Language of the Listening Eye Introduction: Oblique Modernism I. Listening to Incense: Melomania and the Pathos of Emancipation II. Sublime Impudence: Synaesthesia and Music from Romanticism to Modernism III. Wagnerism: A Telephone from the Beyond IV. Drawing a Blank: Symbolist Retraction V. Afternoon of a Faun: Pictorialism, Dance, and the American Arcady VI. Fourth Dimension, Sixth Sense: or Sublime Impudence Revisited VII. Endless Melody: A Theoretical Excursion Coda: Moments, Monuments, and Modernism Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"History of Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism and Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory are companion volumes carving forking paths from early German Romanticism through Wagnerism to the proliferation of international avant-gardes and the global convulsions of jazz before following the ungrounding of these upheavals back to prehistoric precedents in cave painting, reading modernism as a "renaissance of the archaic." With the prodigious and perhaps unprecedented range and variety of materials these volumes convene across nine hundred pages, Rasula has demonstrated that it is indeed possible to develop a research practice and a prose style adequate to the sheer profusion of modernist precedent." — Nathan Brown, Boundary 2

"Breathtaking and beautifully written, Jed Rasula's History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism is a masterpiece of modernist criticism. Drawing on a vast archive of texts, paintings, scripts, scores, and historical anecdotes, Rasula traces the genealogies of modernism across the arts." —Modern Language Association

"Jed Rasula's History of a Shiver fundamentally rewrites the genealogy of modernism. Much studied, modernism has become comfortably familiar. Rasula's vastly learned and lucid study defamiliarizes it again, recovering the inherent strangeness and polymorphism of modernist art and aesthetics and embedding them in a dazzling network of cross-references—some inevitable, some surprising, some long forgotten, but all fascinating." —Lawrence Kramer, author of Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge

"Jed Rasula's History of a Shiver makes a handsome addition to the growing corpus of modernist criticism. A compelling cultural history that brings many polyphonic strands of debate together, it provides a necessary refinement of both modernism's history and the interplay of its constituent ideas." —Simon Shaw-Miller, author of Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage

"Rasula has composed a book of striking intellectual virtuosity and wide historical reach. The unsettlements of Modernism—its mixing of forms, its synesthestic longings, its Wagnerism, its unreconciled self-surpassing vigor-have never been more vividly rendered. Written with a verve and provocation worthy of its subject, History of a Shiver deserves immediate attention and long patient study." —Michael Levenson, author of Modernism

"Essential."—Choice

From the Publisher