1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910457695003321

Autore

Roberts David <1937->

Titolo

The Total Work of Art in European Modernism / David Roberts

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, N.Y. : , : Cornell University Library, , 2011

©2011

ISBN

0-8014-6097-2

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (301 p.)

Collana

Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought

Disciplina

111/.85

Soggetti

Arts, European - 20th century - Philosophy

Arts, European - 19th century - Philosophy

Arts, Modern - Philosophy

Modernism (Aesthetics)

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- Part I. The Artwork of the Future -- Part II. The Spiritual in Art -- Part III. The Sublime in Politics -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In this groundbreaking book, David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with



progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. In a major departure from the existing literature David Roberts argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890's forward.