To the Collector Belong the Spoils (eBook)

Modernism and the Art of Appropriation

Annie Pfeifer (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023
366 Seiten
Cornell University Press (Verlag)
9781501767807 (ISBN)

Infos

To the Collector Belong the Spoils rethinks collecting as an artistic, revolutionary, and appropriative modernist practice, which flourishes beyond institutions like museums or archives. Through a constellation of three author-collectors—Henry James, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein—Annie Pfeifer examines the relationship between literary modernism and twentieth-century practices of collecting objects. From James's paper hoarding to Einstein's mania for African art and Benjamin's obsession with old Russian toys, she shows how these authors' literary techniques of compiling, gleaning, and reassembling constitute a modernist style of collecting that reimagines the relationship between author and text, source and medium. Placing Benjamin and Einstein in surprising conversation with James sharpens the contours of collecting as aesthetic and political praxis underpinned by dangerous passions. An apt figure for modernity, the collector is caught between preservation and transformation, order and chaos, the past and the future.

Positing a shadow history of modernism rooted in collection, citation, and paraphrase, To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces the movement's artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past. By despoiling and decontextualizing the work of others, these three authors engaged in a form of creative plunder that evokes collecting's long history in the spoils of war and conquest. As Pfeifer demonstrates, more than an archive or taxonomy, modernist collecting practices became a radical, creative endeavor—the artist as collector, the collector as artist.

Autor

Annie Pfeifer is Assistant Professor in the German Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. She is the coeditor of "Walk I Absolutely Must." Follow her on X @anniepfeifer.

Inhalt

Introduction: Dangerous Passions
Part One: Possessing the Old World: Henry James and the Spoils of Europe
1. James's Human Bibelots
2. Sardanapalus's Hoard
Part Two: Between Salvation and Revolution: Walter Benjamin's Conflicted Collector
3. The Collector in a Collectivist State
4. Trash-Talking in The Arcades Project
Part Three: Collecting Africa: Carl Einstein's Ethnographic Surrealism
5. The Collector and His Circle
6. Einstein's "Critical Dictionary"
Afterword: Hoarding in a Digital Age

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.2.2023
• Zusatzinfo: 26 b&w halftones
• Verlagsort: Ithaca
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: Henry James, Walter Benjamin, collecting and literature, Spolia studies,collecting and modernism, appropriation and modernism, hoarding
• ISBN-13: 9781501767807 / 9781501767807