Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art

Nico Israel

Published by Columbia University Press 2015

Spirals

The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art

Nico Israel

In the series Modernist Latitudes

https://doi.org/10.7312/isra15302

Overview
Contents

About this book

In this elegantly written and beautifully illustrated book, Nico Israel reveals how spirals are at the heart of the most significant literature and visual art of the twentieth century. Juxtaposing the work of writers and artists—including W. B. Yeats and Vladimir Tatlin, James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett and Robert Smithson—he argues that spirals provide a crucial frame for understanding the mutual involvement of modernity, history, and geopolitics.

Nico Israel argues that spirals illuminate the torsions of history and geopolitics within modernity. Taking the form of the spiral not only as his topic but as inspiration for his method, Israel challenges familiar, discipline-based approaches to modernism and its aftermaths and gives twenty-first-century theory an important new spin.

Author / Editor information

Nico Israel is an associate professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center and Hunter College. He is the author of Outlandish: Writing Between Exile and Diaspora and has published numerous academic essays on twentieth-century literature and critical theory. He has also published widely on modern and contemporary visual art in Artforum, art exhibition catalogs, and other publications.

Reviews

Roger Rothman:
Stunningly ambitious.... Israel's book opens up a number of new avenues for investigation.

Adrienne Janus:
Elegantly written, theoretically sophisticated.... Israel's ground-breaking work... may have scholars in Modernist Studies, Comparative Literature, and Visual Culture seeing spirals everywhere.

Joseph O'Neill, Bard College, author of Netherland:
As it transversely curves from one plane of inquiry to another, this book brilliantly enacts its central insight and mystery: the path of artistic inquiry offered, and accepted, by the spiral. Nico Israel is a wonderful stylist of perception, and this is a joyful and profound work.

Jennifer Wicke, University of Virginia:
Nico Israel's brilliant Spirals skyrockets across the extreme twentieth century to land with utmost illumination in our own. In tensile prose as elegant as it is urgent, as sinuous as it is conceptually agile, and with a dazzling command of the multiple languages, disciplines, and global remit of modernity, Israel reveals how embedded the spiral is in the tissue of modern thought and ethics, and how important it is as a mode of reading the world. Breaking through the silo of our understanding, the vibrant matter Israel sets whirling in this crucial book is nothing less than a world future, a spiraling ring of agency that encircles and enacts a commons.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsyvlania:
Nico Israel's superb Spirals revisits a history of modernity whose most secret desires and powerful realizations are captured by the dialectical image of the spiral. Not just echoes of Baroque forms, modernist spirals fascinate with endless lines and infinite dynamism. From Tatlin's Constructivism to Yeats's gyres, from Duchamp's Rotoreliefs to Smithson's Spiral Jetty, from Ubu's helical paunch to Kentridge's whirling cartoons, we rediscover works that renew our understanding of the world.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
ILLUSTRATIONS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Introduction: On Spirals Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Definitions: A Brief History of Spirals (and a Way of Reading Spirally) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	21
2. Entering the Whirlpool: ’Pataphysics, Futurism, Vorticism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
3. Twinned Towers: Yeats, Tatlin, and the Unfashionable Performance of Internationalism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
4. L’Habite en Spirale: Duchamp, Joyce, and the Ineluctable Visibility of Entropy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
5. At the End of the Jetty: Beckett . . . Smithson. Recoil . . Return Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	161
In Conclusion: The Spiral and the Grid Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	275
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	279

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 272
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 60
- Other: <B>60 b&w illus. and 18 color illus.</B>

eBook

Published: February 24, 2015
ISBN: 9780231526685