Anexact Form and Modernist Culture

• Presents new everyday aesthetic categories of use to students and researchers of twentieth and twenty-first century culture
• Engages with a range of contemporary discourse, including new formalism, new modernist studies, affect theory, and weak theory
• Offers new readings of canonical and understudied avant-garde artists and writers, including Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, Christine Brooke-Rose, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Harry Mathews, Nam June Paik, Cy Twombly, Ann Quin, and Marguerite Young
• Constructs a unique framework for understanding avant-garde art and literature that looks beyond binaries of modernism and post-modernism

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.