Anexact Form and Modernist Culture

What happens to form in a time of random walks and Uncertainty Principles, self-organising plasma membranes and multivalent logics? And how might we better categorise the modernist avant-garde's confrontation with such complex and contradictory formalisms? Anexact Form and Modernist Culture presents a soft taxonomy of the long mid-century avant-garde's fuzzy, grey, and viscous forms while investigating the aesthetic and affective valences of that which is 'essentially and not accidentally inexact', as Edmund Husserl writes in Ideas I (1913). Across five chapters - on doodles and inkblots; iridescent surfaces and the noise of becoming; the erratic cultural life of precision; the mesomorphic imagination of protoplasm; and the groovy aesthetics of industrial chemistry - Anexact Form and Modernist Culture offers a unique examination of avant-garde art and literature in a time of unprecedented err, smudge, ooze and wriggle.

• | Author: James Reath
• | Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• | Publication Date: Jul 31, 2025
• | Number of Pages: 00312 pages
• | Binding: Hardback or Cased Book
• | ISBN-10: 1399547496
• | ISBN-13: 9781399547499