
On Weight and the Will
The Forces of Form in German Literature and Aesthetics, 1890-1930
Malika Maskarinec(Author)
Northwestern University Press
Will be published approx. on 30. August 2018
Book
Paperback/Softback
280 pages
978-0-8101-3769-1 (ISBN)
Description
On Weight and the Will: The Forces of Form in German Literature and Aesthetics, 1890-1930 charts a modern history of form as emergent from force. Offering a provocative alternative to the imagery of crisis and estrangement that has preoccupied scholarship on modernism, Malika Maskarinec shows that German modernism conceives of human bodies and aesthetic objects as shaped by a contest of conflicting and reciprocally-intensifying forces: the force of gravity and a self-determining will to form. Maskarinec thereby discloses, for the first time, German modernism's sustained preoccupation with classical mechanics and with how human bodies and artworks resist gravity. Considering canonical artists such as Rodin and Klee, seminal authors such as Kafka and Doeblin, and largely neglected thinkers in aesthetics and art history such as those associated with Empathy Aesthetics, Maskarinec unpacks the manifold anthropological and aesthetic concerns and historical lineage embedded in the idea of form as the precarious achievement of uprightness. On Weight and the Will makes a decisive contribution to our understanding of modernism and to contemporary discussions about form, empathy, materiality, and human embodiment.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Evanston
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
14 black & white images
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
337 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8101-3769-1 (9780810137691)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Malika Maskarinec is the managing director of eikones, the National Center of Competence in Research on Visual Studies at the Universitaet Basel and the coeditor of Formbegriff und Formklaerung: Das Formdenken der Moderne.