Remarkable Modernisms: Contemporary American Authors on Modern Art - Hardcover

Morris, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558493247 ISBN 13: 9781558493247

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002

Synopsis

For the authors discussed in "Remarkable Modernisms" - poets John Yau, Charles Simic, and Mark Strand, and novelists Ann Beattie and Joyce Carol Oates - writing about modern art not only helps to illuminate the work of the artist but also serves as a stimulus to verbal self-portraiture. By revealing as much about their own lives and works as they do about the visual objects reviewed - pieces for example by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Alex Katz, Edward Hopper and George Bellows - the authors studied by Daniel Morris extend the scope of their analysis. In all five cases, writing about art becomes a critical inquiry into the nature of public acts of witnessing and private acts of seeing and not seeing. While challenging older, rigidly formalist approaches, these authors also diverge from the strictly contextual approaches favoured by many contemporary academic critics. As poets and novelists, they remain sensitive to the value of compositional techniques when they address a visual artifact, and they reject the shibboleth of "content" versus "formalist" approaches to art. They reveal that this dichotomy fails to account for the "semantics of form" - the interwoven relationship between the "how" and the "what" of a work of art. Indebted to visual art as a basis for their own compositional discoveries in words, these authors' writings on art have the effect of turning pictures into a language that extends our frame of reference beyond the flat surface of the picture plane to each author's version of contemporary society as social text.

About this title

About the Author:

DANIEL MORRIS is associate professor of English at Purdue University and author of The Writings of William Carlos Williams: Publicity For the Self.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1558493247
• ISBN 13: 9781558493247
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224