Anexact Form and Modernist Culture

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.

Author: James Reath
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 07/31/2025
Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing
Pages: 312
Weight: 1.36lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.75d
ISBN: 9781399547499