The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism

ISBN: 0198851448

Author: Haacke, Paul

Condition: New

From the invention of skyscrapers and airplanes to the development of the nuclear bomb, ideas about the modern increasingly revolved around vertiginous images of ascension and decline and new technologies of mobility and terror from above. In The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism, Paul Haacke examines this turn by focusing on discourses of aspiration, catastrophe, suspension, and power in major works of European and American literature as well as film, architecture, and intellectual and cultural history.This wide-ranging and pointed study begins with canonical fiction by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and Richard Wright, as well as poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, and Aimé Césaire, before moving to critical reflections on the rise of New York City by architects and writers from Le Corbusier to Simone de Beauvoir, the films of Alfred Hitchcock in relation to theories of cinematic space and time, and postwar novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among many other examples. In tracing the rise and fall of modernist discourse over the course of the long twentieth century, this book shows how visions of vertical elevation turned from established ideas about nature, the body, and religion to growing anxieties about aesthetic distinction, technological advancement, and American capitalism and empire. It argues that spectacles of height and flight became symbols and icons of ambition as well as direct indexes of power, and thus that the vertical transformation of modernity was both material and imagined, taking place at the same time through the rapidly expanding built environment and shifting ideological constructions of "high" and "low."TABLE OF CONTENTSIntroduction: The Vertical Turn-Quasimodern, or, What Will Kill What?-The Dialectics of Verticality and the Long Twentieth Century-Space, Time, and the Logic of Metaphor-Modernism and Late Capitalism-Chapter Overview1. Transatlantic Topographies-The Rise of Aerial Modernity-Transcendental Aspiration and Immanent Contingency-Skyscrapers, Airplanes, and the Technological Sublime-Bigness and the Spirit of Capitalism-Racial Subjection, Uplift, and Solidarity (from Du Bois to Wright, Ellison, and Cesaire)2. Vertiginous Aspiration-Post-Romantic Aspirations-Apollinaire's Turning Towers-Kafka's Irony of Transcendence-Woolf 's Views from Below-Stephen Dedalus and the Sovereignty of Art-Leopold Bloom's Comic Gravity3. Enchanted Catastrophe-Metropolitan Enchantment and Creative Destruction-From the New York World to the Tyranny of the Skyscraper-John Dos Passos and the Tragedy of Architecture-Le Corbusier's Lever of Hope-The Ruins of History (Levi-Strauss and Sartre)-Beauvoir's New Belonging-Certeau's Pedestrian Enchantment4. Cinematic Terror-Hitchcock's Displacement of Terror-French Twist-The Metropolis and Depth Psychology-The Centripetal and the Centrifugal-Displacement, Recognition, and the Time-Image5. Critical Suspension-The Age of Anxiety and the Burdens of History-Dangling Men: Bellow and Heller-Vonnegut's Historical Relief-Pynchon's Irony of Immanence-Silko's Ground ZeroCoda: On the Horizon-Globalization, Uneven Development, and Horizontal Flow-Toward a Multi-Layered History of the Future