Past decades have seen a renewed interest in the body and in its cultural, historical, social, literary and philosophical production. In Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (1998), Tim Armstrong traces the relationship between “the body and its technologies” as a prevailing theme in the modernist literary works of, for example, W. B. Yeats, Henry James, Mina Loy,Gertrude Stein, T. S.Eliot and Ezra Pound.More recentlymodernist studies have also begun to explore the significance of the body in performance. A number of persuasive accounts, for example Olga Taxidou’s 2007 Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht, and Penny Farfan’s 2004 Women, Modernism and Performance, have revealed the modernist championing of formal elements (whether textual, choreographic, painterly or cinematic), as a means to register the transient and fleeting nature of subjective experience. Studies such as these have shown modernist aesthetics to be deeply implicated in the technological and scientific developments at the time, yet the kinaesthetic dimension of the body has remained largely neglected. Modernism’s concern with the kinaesthetic suggests that ‘meaning’ or ‘conceptual content’ is firmly—if sometimes opaquely—embedded in modernist works as experiential. In turning to the phenomenology of kinaesthetic experience, the present study therefore seeks to contribute to the re-evaluation of the body in ‘Modernist Studies’. Questions of embodiment, then, much like questions of society’s technological developments, serve to highlight a broader theme in modernism, experience, as indicated by the focus on the body. Clearly, formal issues are at the heart of the modernist exploration of the artistic expression and the kinaesthetic body figures in these explorations as an important vehicle, not only to express specific ideas but also to participate in their dissemination. But the modernist preoccupation with the formal aesthetics of the work of art successively translates into a preoccupation with the kinaesthetic, thereby implicating both the status of the work of art and art’s capacity to produce certain effects or be expressive of certain experiences. Indeed, modernism’s ‘crisis of the subject’ calls for new solutions to new problems and, notably, the transformation of the role of art seems to predicate on the understanding that there is a kinaesthetic dimension to experience. Given that cognition is an embodied event and kinaesthetic experience is implicitly part of the organisation of knowledge, modernism’s emphasis on formal elements should therefore be seen as an effort to produce certain experiences, as the concern with for example narrative and temporal structure, point of view and perspective—whether in music, painting, film, dance or literature—shows. In addition to looking at the different ways in which the body appears in modernist works of art, the study will examine the way in which kinaesthetic experience is evoked in modernist works, across art forms. (Admittedly, this is a wide scope and one that includes a broad set of art forms, yet the project’s specific focus on the connections between theory and practice in modernism makes it feasible to address all of them within the framework of the project.) The works studied will be read in conjunction with the critical self-commentaries offered by a selection of modernist artists about their own and others’ works. Through examining audiences’ responses to a selection of artworks—as playgoers or critics or in letters and diaries—and through recognising the historical intertwining of artistic practice and the critical and theoretical discourse that reflects its significance in a particular moment, the project seeks to understand modernism’s concern with the body on its own terms.
2019.