Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form

Judith Brown

Published by Cornell University Press 2009

Glamour in Six Dimensions

Modernism and the Radiance of Form

Judith Brown

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501731242

Overview
Contents

About this book

Glamour is an alluring but elusive concept. We most readily associate it with fashion, industrial design, and Hollywood of the Golden Age, and yet it also shaped the language and interests of high modernism. In Glamour in Six Dimensions, Judith Brown...

Author / Editor information

Judith Brown is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University.

Reviews

Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania:

Weaving her neat hexagonal spiderweb, Judith Brown exhibits scintillating jewels caught in a series of dialectical images. She throws fresh light on canonical modernist writers: Chanel No. 5 next to Wallace Stevens's abstraction and Eliot's impersonality; celebrity photographs in Fitzgerald and Woolf; cigarette publicity for the jazz age; translucent plastic and shimmering cellophane wrapping Larsen, Stein, and Barnes. No longer striving for the great acorn of light or the gemlike flame of an earlier generation, Brown's modernism sparkles and shimmers on flat surfaces like glossy photographic paper. The vanishing aura of modernity still glitters through modernist glamour, now quasi-eternal: glamour toujours!

Jane Garrity, University of Colorado:

This sophisticated, informed, and visually stunning book makes a significant and original contribution to the New Modernist Studies. Judith Brown's premise that glamour inheres in the very problem of modernist form is entirely original and manages to sustain a line of argument extending from Greta Garbo to Conrad to cellophane. Glamour in Six Dimensions is marked by Brown's sheer innovative genius.

Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Rutgers University:

In this very appealing, readable, and erudite book, Judith Brown shows that there is something cruel about glamour, and therefore something cruel about modernism, but she shows too that modernism's cruelty can allow us to appreciate the sensuality of modern culture. Instead of limiting glamour to a pernicious effect of commodification, as it is often understood by Frankfurt School critiques of the culture industry, Glamour in Six Dimensions approaches it as a spur to imagination, feeling, and invention. Brown's elegant readings convince us that glamour is modernism's invention—and its legacy.

Sianne Ngai, UCLA:

Glamour in Six Dimensions is a fascinating and unforgettable book about a bewitchingly negative, even deathly, aesthetic. Judith Brown's provocative arguments about glamour's roots in modernist literary form and complicated status as both a sign of the degradation and persistence of aesthetic 'aura,' are sure to recharge the debate about modernist literature's relationship to mass culture. This book is a must-read for anyone working on modernism and twentieth-century aesthetics.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
List of Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Perception CHANEL NO. 5, WALLACE STEVENS, THE SUBLIME Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	20
2. Violence SCOTT FITZGERALD, FASCINATION, KATHERINE MANSFIELD Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	44
3. Photography VIRGINIA WOOLF, GRAMMAR, DESIRE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	70
4. Celebrity 1910, THE EXTINCTION OF PERSONALITY, GRETA GARBO Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	97
5. Primitivism WALLACE THURMAN, NELLA LARSEN, JOSEPHINE BAKER Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
6. Cellophane FLORINE STETTHEIMER, GERTRUDE STEIN, BLANKNESS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	173
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	195

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 216
Illustrations
- Other: 17 halftones
Keywords: Literary Studies; Cultural Studies

eBook

Published: September 5, 2018
ISBN: 9781501731242