On Weight and the Will

The Forces of Form in German Literature and Aesthetics, 1890–1930
Erscheinungsjahr 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3769-1
Verlag: Northwestern University Press

Buch, Englisch, 280 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

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 Döblin, 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: 19. Jahrhundert

Über Autor(innen)

Malika Maskarinec is the managing director of eikones, the National Center of Competence in Research on Visual Studies at the Universität Basel and the coeditor of Formbegriff und Formklärung: Das Formdenken der Moderne.