Archaeologies of Modernity explores the shift from the powerful tradition of literary forms of Bildung-the education of the individual as the self-to the visual forms of "Bildung" (from Bild) that characterize German modernism and the European avant-garde. Interrelated chapters examine the work of Franz Kafka, Jean/Hans Arp, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein, and of artists such as Oskar Kokoschka or Kurt Schwitters, in the light of the surge of an autoformation (Bildung) of verbal and visual images at the core of expressionist and surrealist aesthetics and the art that followed. In this first scholarly focus on modernist avant-garde Bildung in its entwinement of conceptual modernity with forms of the archaic, Rumold resituates the significance of the poet and art theorist Einstein and his work on the language of primitivism and the visual imagination.

Archaeologies of Modernity is a major reconsideration of the conception of the modernist project and will be of interest to scholars across the disciplines.

About the Author
Rainer Rumold is Professor Emeritus of German Literature and Critical Thought at Northwestern University, USA. His previous books include Eugene Jolas's autobiography, Man from Babel (1988), which he edited with Andreas Kramer; The Janus Face of the German Avant-Garde: From Expressionism toward Postmodernism (Northwestern, 2001); and, coedited with Klaus H. Kiefer, Eugene Jolas: Critical Writings, 1924-1951 (Northwestern, 2009).


Book Information
ISBN 9780810131125
Author Rainer Rumold
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Northwestern University Press
Publisher Northwestern University Press
Weight(grams) 492g