Pumpkin Wholesale

welcome books audio dvd stationery

search


List books added in the last days with at least copies in stock

 
browse books
fiction
sciences
art & media
music
stage & screen
art, photography & fashion
architecture & design
literature & poetry
biographies & memoirs
children's
general non fiction
humour
leisure
humanities
[cover image]

Total Expansion of the Letter
Trevor Stark

Category: Art & Media: Art, Photography & Fashion
ISBN: 0-262-04371-8 EAN: 978-0-262-04371-7 Format: Hardback Pages: 420 Publisher: MIT Press Year: 2020 Quantity in Stock: 16
Cover price: £45 Sale Price: £8.99

How cubism and Dada radically reimagined the social nature of language, following the utopian poetic vision of Stéphane Mallarmé. At the outset of the twentieth century, language became a visual medium and a philosophical problem for European avant-garde artists. In Total Expansion of the Letter, art historian Trevor Stark offers a provocative history of this “linguistic turn,” centered on the radical doubt about the social function of language that defined the avant-garde movements. Major cubists and Dadaists—including Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Tristan Tzara—appropriated bureaucratic paperwork, newspapers, popular songs, and advertisements, only to render them dysfunctional and incommunicative. In doing so, Stark argues, these figures contended with the utopian vision of the late nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who promised a “total expansion of the letter.” In his poems, Mallarmé claimed, “the act of writing was scrutinized down to its origins.” This scrutiny, however, delivered his work into an indeterminate zone between mediums, social practices, and temporalities—a paradox that reverberates through Stark's wide-ranging case studies in the history of the avant-garde. Stark examines Picasso's nearly abstract works of 1910, which promised to unite painting and writing at the brink of illegibility; the cubists' “hope of an anonymous art,” expressed in newspaper collages and industrial colors; the collaborative, cacophonous invention of “simultaneous poems” by the Dadaists in Zurich during World War I; and Duchamp's artistic exploration of chance in gambling and finance. Each of these cases reflected the avant-garde's transformative encounter with the premise of Mallarmé's poetics: that language—the very medium of human communication and community—is perpetually in flux and haunted by emptiness.
Quantity: 

Ask a question about this book:

Your name:  Email address: 
Your question:


 
your basket
Your cart is empty.
recover saved
 
recently added books
[cover image] Tenderwire
£2.99
[cover image] The View from the Hill
£6.99
[cover image] Bookish People
£3.99
[cover image] Riddle, Mystery, and Enigma
£5.99

terms and conditions : contact us : open an account : privacy policy

Pumpkin Wholesale Ltd. Company Number: 4035343 VAT registration number: GB750029460