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Book Cover
E-book
Author Maskarinec, Malika, author.

Title The forces of form in German modernism / Malika Maskarinec
Published Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018
©2018

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 223 pages) : illustrations
Contents pt. I Aesthetics of Heaviness -- ch. 1 Prelude: Schopenhauer on Weight and the Will -- ch. 2 Reading Rodin's Vertiginous Bodies -- pt. II Empathy and Abstraction -- ch. 3 Lines of Force: Empathy Aesthetics, 1870 -- 1910 -- ch. 4 Klee's Composition in Suspension -- pt. III Poetic Gravity -- ch. 5 Kafka's Kinetics -- ch. 6 Franz Biberkopf and the Unbearable Heaviness of Being
Summary "The Forces of Form in German Modernism charts a modern history of form as emergent from force. Offering a provocative alternative to the imagery of crisis and estrangement that has preoccupied scholarship on modernism, Malika Maskarinec shows that German modernism conceives of human bodies and aesthetic objects as shaped by a contest of conflicting and reciprocally intensifying forces: the force of gravity and a self-determining will to form. Maskarinec thereby discloses, for the first time, German modernism's sustained preoccupation with classical mechanics and with how human bodies and artworks resist gravity. Considering canonical artists such as Rodin and Klee, seminal authors such as Kafka and Döblin, and largely neglected thinkers in aesthetics and art history such as those associated with Empathy Aesthetics, Maskarinec unpacks the manifold anthropological and aesthetic concerns and historical lineage embedded in the idea of form as the precarious achievement of uprightness. The Forces of Form in German Modernism makes a decisive contribution to our understanding of modernism and to contemporary discussions about form, empathy, materiality, and human embodiment."-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-213) and index
Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on September 27, 2018)
Print version record
Subject Modernism (Art) -- Germany
Art, German -- 20th century.
Gravity in art.
ART -- European.
Gravity in art
Art, German
Modernism (Art)
Germany
Form Electronic book
ISBN 0810137712
9780810137714