Anexact Form and Modernist Culture

By James Reath

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1399547496
• ISBN13: 9781399547499
• Release Date: July 2025
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 1.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"