Cathy Gere: Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (2009)

“In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began to excavate the palace of Knossos on Crete, bringing ancient Greek legends to life just as a new century dawned amid far-reaching questions about human history, art, and culture. With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere relates the fascinating story of Evans’s excavation and its long-term effects on Western culture. After the World War I left the Enlightenment dream in tatters, the lost paradise that Evans offered in the concrete labyrinth—pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—seemed to offer a new way forward for writers, artists, and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Graves, and Hilda Doolittle.

Assembling a brilliant, talented, and eccentric cast at a moment of tremendous intellectual vitality and wrenching change, Cathy Gere paints a portrait of the age of concrete and the birth of modernism.”

Publisher University Of Chicago Press, 2009
ISBN 0226289532, 9780226289533
277 pages

Reviews: Nicoletta Momigliano (Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2009), Mary Beard (The New York Review of Books, 2009), Nanno Marinatos (American Journal of Archaeology, 2010), Marnin Young (NonSite, 2011).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF

Lee Baxandall, Stefan Morawski (eds.): Marx & Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings (1973)

A concise compilation of texts divided into nine sections with a judicious introductory essay by Morawski.

Translations and selections by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski
Introduction by Stefan Morawski
Publisher Telos Press, St. Louis/MI, 1973
ISBN 0914386026
175 pages
via Charles, in the Unlimited Edition

Review: M. L. Raina (Minnesota Review, 1975)
Marxist aesthetics on Monoskop wiki

PDF (5 MB, updated to an OCR’d version via Marcell Mars)

See also Margaret A. Rose’s Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts, 1984.

Alondra Nelson (ed.): Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text (2002)

The issue guest edited and introduced by Alondra Nelson explores futurist themes, sci-fi imagery, and technological innovation in African diasporic culture. Contributors approach this under-explored theme from a variety of angles: as a novel frame of reference for visual culture; as fiction of the near-future; as poetry; as new forms of black subjectivity; as new narratives about the digital revolution; and as the imagining of future directions in African diasporic studies. Alexander G. Weheliye rethinks the category of the posthuman. Ron Eglash historicizes the nerd, while Anna Everett shows how the African diaspora prefigures the Internet. Kali Tal explores the utopian vision of black militant near-future fiction, whose heir apparent, Nalo Hopkinson, is interviewed by Alondra Nelson. The esthetic possibilities of this project are evident in poetry by Tracie Morris, and the images of Tana Hargest and Fatimah Tuggar.

Social Text 71, Summer 2002
146 pages

Publisher

PDF (15 MB)