Archaeologies of Modernity

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Archaeologies of Modernity is the first study to explore the shift from the idealist tradition of literary forms of Bildung - the education of self - to heterogeneous visual forms (from Bild as image) that characterize German modernism and the European avant-garde. Rainer Rumold reviews the work of writers Franz Kafka, Jean/Hans Arp, Walter Benjamin, Carl Einstein, and of artists such as Oskar Kokoschka and Kurt Schwitters, in light of an expressionist and surrealist physiology of aesthetics. In his focus on the entwinement of conceptual modernity with the auto-formations and informes (Bataille) of the archaic, the author resituates the art theorist Einstein's critique of a nonmetaphorical language of primitivism and the imagination vis-à-vis Benjamin's. Archaeologies of Modernity is a major interdisciplinary reconsideration of the modern project. -- from back cover.