Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism
Author: Brian Pines
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2019-02-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 150133915X

Friedrich Nietzsche believed his own work represented the dawning of a new historical era, and, despite the fact that he lived most of his sane life suffering in obscurity, it is not an exaggeration to say that his vision helped lay the foundations for modernism in style, substance and attitude. Nietzsche was himself devoted to the modern, for he reinterpreted every philosophy, every historical figure and event, every movement that came before him. This reconceptualization of the past through new, modern eyes opened up Nietzsche's thinking to exploring daring possibilities for the future. This prophetic boldness, which is so unique to his style, seduced the modernist generation across the spectrum. He was read by early Zionists as well as by Nazi racial theorists; by Thomas Mann and as well as by Salvador Dali. His influence stretched from psychoanalysis to anarchist politics. Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism traces the effect of Nietzsche's thinking upon a diverse set of problems: from ontology, to politics, to musical and literary aesthetics. The first section of the volume is a series of essays, each exploring a major work of Nietzsche's, explaining its significance while contributing new interpretations of the text. The middle portion connects Nietzsche's thought to the various strands of modernism in which it reveals itself. The final section is a glossary of key terms that Nietzsche uses throughout his works. An excellent resource for any scholar attempting to conceptualize the foundations of modernism or the historical importance of Nietzsche, this volume seeks to outline the philosopher's works and their reception amongst the generations that immediately followed his passing.

Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism

Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism
Author: Robert Gooding-Williams
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2001
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780804732956

In arguing that Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a philosophical explanation of the possibility of modernism, the author shows that literary fiction can do the work of philosophy.

Friedrich Nietzsche and the Artists of the New Weimar

Friedrich Nietzsche and the Artists of the New Weimar
Author: Sebastian Schütze
Publisher: 5 Continents Editions
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2019
Genre: Art
ISBN:

"Around 1900, a small group of influential patrons, critics, writers, and artists turned Weimar, the capital of the small Duchy of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach in present-day Germany, into a utopian centre of modern art and thought. Artists like Max Klinger, Edvard Munch, and Ludwig von Hofmann, and writers like André Gide, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Rainer Maria Rilke sought to create a 'New Weimar and position Friedrich Nietzsche at its head as the radical prophet of modernity. Nietzsche's profound thinking, expressive language, and poignant aphoristic style made him the ideal philosopher of modernism. It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified. With philosophical maxims, such as this from The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche became an extraordinary influence on artists and critics in their search for a 'new art,' a 'new man,' and, ultimately, a 'new society.' In 1902, two years after the philosopher's death, Max Klinger was commissioned to carve his portrait for the Villa Silberblick in Weimar, where the cult of Nietzsche was organized. Starting from a heavily reworked death mask, he executed the famous marble herm that still today adorns the reception room of the Nietzsche Archive. Only three monumental bronze versions were cast, one of which is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. With this sculpture in focus, accompanied by a series of paintings, drawings, plaster casts, and small bronzes, 'Radical Modernism' will show how Klinger and his patrons invented the 'official' Nietzsche, transforming a highly expressionist portrait into an idealized classical cult image."--publisher.

Reading Pound Reading

Reading Pound Reading
Author: Kathryne V. Lindberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 314
Release: 1987
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

This book examines Ezra Pound's own critical writing in an effort to establish its links both to 19th-century thought and to modern critical movements ranging from New Criticism to post-structuralism. Lindberg argues that traditional Modernist views of Pound held by the literary academy fail to describe the work of a writer who defied all literary boundaries--including the literary practices and tenets of "modernism." This book examines Ezra Pound's own critical writing in an effort to establish its links both to 19th-century thought and to modern critical movements ranging from New Criticism to post-structuralism. Lindberg argues that traditional Modernist views of Pound held by the literary academy fail to describe the work of a writer who defied all literary boundaries--including the literary practives and tenets of "modernism."

Modernism After the Death of God

Modernism After the Death of God
Author: Stephen Kern
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351603175

Modernism After the Death of God explores the work of seven influential modernists. Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, André Gide, and Martin Heidegger criticized the destructive impact that they believed Christian sexual morality had had or threatened to have on their love life. Although not a Christian, Freud criticized the negative effect that Christian sexual morality had on his clinical subjects and on Western civilization, while Virginia Woolf condemned how her society was sanctioned by a patriarchal Christian authority. All seven worked to replace the loss or absence of Christian unity with non-Christian unifying projects in their respective fields of philosophy, psychiatry, or literature. The basic structure of their main contributions to modernist culture was a dynamic interaction of radical fragmentation necessitating radical unification that was always in process and never complete.

Defining Modernism

Defining Modernism
Author: Andrea Gogröf-Voorhees
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 218
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780820437934

Defining Modernism investigates the intellectual connections among three leading nineteenth-century European modernists - Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Richard Wagner. Through a close reading of Baudelaire's and Nietzsche's essays on art and culture, Wagner's role in the two writers' attempts to define the radically new concept of «modernism» is elucidated. Gogröf-Voorhees explores the affinity between the two writers, which emerges from a juxtaposition of their formulations of the idea of a fractured, contradictory modernity that at once embraces, scatters, and reevaluates an entire constellation of ideas, including romanticism, pessimism, decadence, and nihilism.

Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City

Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City
Author: Ara H. Merjian
Publisher:
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300176599

Painted in Paris on the eve of World War One, the Metaphysical cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) redirected the course of modernist painting and the modern architectural imagination alike. Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City examines the two most salient dimensions of the artist’s early imagery: its representations of architectural space and its sustained engagement with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Centering upon a single painting from 1914 – deemed by the painter “the fatal year” – each chapter examines why and how de Chirico’s self-declared “Nietzschean method” takes architecture as its pictorial means and metaphor. The first, full-length study in English to focus on the painter’s seminal work from pre-war Paris, the book places de Chirico’s “literary” images back in the context of the city’s avant-garde, particularly the circle of Guillaume Apollinaire. Merjian’s study sheds light on one of the most influential and least understood figures in 20th-century aesthetics, while also contributing to an understanding of Nietzsche’s paradoxical consequences for modernism.

Heirs to Dionysus

Heirs to Dionysus
Author: John Burt Foster, Jr.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 490
Release: 2017-03-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1400886120

Building on recent transformative theories of influence, John Foster explores the many ways Nietzsche's intellectual and artistic example helped shape an interconnected series of major literary projects from 1900 to the 1940s. He portrays Nietzsche as a stimulating but disturbing force who left a well-defined legacy of concerns that modernists appropriated for their fiction. The author focuses particularly on Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Malraux, and Mann, analyzing their strategies of acceptance, revision, and subversion. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Phantom of the Ego

The Phantom of the Ego
Author: Nidesh Lawtoo
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1628950420

The Phantom of the Ego is the first comparative study that shows how the modernist account of the unconscious anticipates contemporary discoveries about the importance of mimesis in the formation of subjectivity. Rather than beginning with Sigmund Freud as the father of modernism, Nidesh Lawtoo starts with Friedrich Nietzsche’s antimetaphysical diagnostic of the ego, his realization that mimetic reflexes—from sympathy to hypnosis, to contagion, to crowd behavior—move the soul, and his insistence that psychology informs philosophical reflection. Through a transdisciplinary, comparative reading of landmark modernist authors like Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Georges Bataille, Lawtoo shows that, before being a timely empirical discovery, the “mimetic unconscious” emerged from an untimely current in literary and philosophical modernism. This book traces the psychological, ethical, political, and cultural implications of the realization that the modern ego is born out of the spirit of imitation; it is thus, strictly speaking, not an ego, but what Nietzsche calls, “a phantom of the ego.” The Phantom of the Ego opens up a Nietzschean back door to the unconscious that has mimesis rather than dreams as its via regia, and argues that the modernist account of the “mimetic unconscious” makes our understanding of the psyche new.

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Transition to Postmodernity

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Transition to Postmodernity
Author: Gregory B. Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 1996-02-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780226763408

Nietzsche and Heidegger, Smith argues, have made possible a far more revolutionary critique of modernity than even their most ardent postmodern admirers have realized.