Mid Sweden University

miun.sePublications
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Modernism and Kinaesthesia: The Use of the Body in Modernist Art
Mid Sweden University, Faculty of Human Sciences, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-0918-899X
2019 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

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.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2019.
National Category
General Literature Studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:miun:diva-40767OAI: oai:DiVA.org:miun-40767DiVA, id: diva2:1510210
Conference
The Uses of Aesthetics, Karlstads Universitet, 12-14 september 2019
Available from: 2020-12-15 Created: 2020-12-15 Last updated: 2021-11-03Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

No full text in DiVA

Authority records

Palmstierna Einarsson, Charlotta

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Palmstierna Einarsson, Charlotta
By organisation
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
General Literature Studies

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar

urn-nbn

Altmetric score

urn-nbn
Total: 399 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf