Sarah Posman Knihy

Stein's modernist fascination with life connects her writing to late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers This book focuses on Gertrude Stein, who wanted to capture 'this thing life' in writing, and argues that Stein is linked to a number of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers, who, like Stein, also conceived of life as an open, differential system. These chapters weave together Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin and A. N. Whitehead, offering readers an alternative vitalist framework. Dr Sarah Posman is an English teacher in Ghent, Belgium.

It has often been argued that the arrival of the early-20th-century avant-gardes and modernisms coincided with an in-depth exploration of the materiality of art and writing. The European historical avant-gardes and modernisms excelled in their attempts to establish the specificity of media and art forms as well as in experimenting with the hybridity of the materials of their multiple disciplines. This third volume of the series European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies sheds light on the full range and import of this aspect in avant-garde and modernist aesthetics across all art forms and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The book’s contributions, written by experts from some 20 countries, seek to answer the following questions: What sort of objects and material, works and media help us to properly grasp the avant-garde and modernist “aesthetics of matter”? How were affects, emotions and sensory and bodily experiences transferred and transformed in the experiment with matter? How were “immaterial” things such as concepts of time changed in this aesthetic moment? What “material meanings” were disseminated in the cultural transfer and translation of objects? How did subsequent avant-gardes deal with the “aesthetics of matter” in their response to historical predecessors?