Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity

Abstraction is one of the most important words in modernism and in the critical thought of modernity, yet its complex work is invariably hidden in plain sight. What do we want from abstraction? Does it refer to thought, or to art? Is it a term of reproach, or of affirmation? Beyond these distinctions, Jeff Wallace's new intellectual history of abstraction in modernism and modernity proposes that abstraction is always uniquely concerned with the importance and revaluation of the inhuman in and for the human. Wallace's case studies range across the writings of Raymond Williams and Paul Valéry, Marx and Marxist aesthetics, the discourse on abstract visual art in Cézanne, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Newman, the literary experimentalisms of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett, and the twenty-first-century legacies of modernist abstraction in two forms: the post-Deleuzian resurgence of interest in the philosophies of William James, Henri Bergson and A. N. Whitehead; and the act of looking at the abstract canvas in plays by Yasmina Reza, John Logan and Lee Hall. Contrary to habitual associations of abstraction's difficulty with the exclusivity of high modernism, Wallace finds an inclusive and democratic impulse at the heart of the difficulty itself - the promise of an abstraction for all.

That abstraction is so abstract, Jeff Wallace's brilliant book shows us, is one of the conceptual difficulties at the heart of aesthetic theory since Marx. This study's response is to make abstraction newly visible, demonstrating, with astonishing clarity and agility, that abstraction is the force attaching the human to the inhuman.--Peter Boxall, University of Sussex

Jeff Wallace is Professor Emeritus at Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author of Beginning Modernism (Manchester University Press, 2011) and D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Palgrave, 2005) and of a range of writing that explores the relations between literature, science and philosophy from modernism to the contemporary, with an emphasis on theories of humanism, critical posthumanism and the inhuman. He is a specialist in D. H. Lawrence studies and has also co-edited volumes on Gothic Modernisms, Raymond Williams, and Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. He is a founding editor of the journal Key Words and currently co-edits the book series New Literary Theory for Routledge.