Wyndham Lewis and the Philosophy of Art in Early Modernist Britain: Creating a Political Aesthetic

Description

This study offers a reconsideration of Wyndham Lewiss work up to the 1930s, based on a wide-ranging engagement with theories of modernity and modernism, against a background of Enlightenment thought. It discusses the philosophical, art historical and literary complexities of Lewiss texts, and what they might mean for our understanding of their political orientation. Grounded in Lewiss aporetic notion of Art, this study takes issue with those critics who attempt to close down these complexities, arguing that Lewiss political statements are both symptomatic of an avant-garde predicament based on his mediation of ideas found in thinkers like Kant and Nietzsche, and thus argumentatively inconclusive at least up to his outright endorsement of fascism in the early 1930s. This book also connects up Lewiss understanding of modernity as an era of rationalization and reification with crucial twentieth century dissident thinkers such as Heidegger and Adorno. Deconstructing the Art : : Life opposition announced in Blast 1 of 1914, this work examines how Lewiss increasing attempts to prioritize visuality and the painters controlling eye admit an aesthetic Utopianism deriving from his early Wild Body stories. It is this aesthetic sensibility, even when inchoate, which proves troublesome to Lewiss own increasing conflation of satire with a totalizing objectivity, and thus to those subsequent commentators on his politics whose own desire for critical mastery is part of the problem of Enlightenment defined. In conclusion, this study extrapolate some key ideas in the direction of current doubts about, and resolutions of, the project of Enlightenment, in the context of its artistic and sociological formations.