Awards

• Winner of Winner of the 2016 MLA Matei Calinescu Prize for a distinguished work of scholarship in twentieth-or twenty-first century literature and thought.
• Winner of Winner of the 2016 MLA Matei Calinescu Prize.

Overview

An abrupt break in the prevailing modes of artistic expression, for many, marks the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century, but revisionary attempts to pin down a precise moment of its emergence remain disputed. History of a Shiver proffers a different approach, tracing the first inkling of modernism instead to the nineteenth century's fascination with music.As Jed Rasula deftly shows, melomania--the passion for music--gave rise to concepts like Richard Wagner's ""endless melody"" and the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, which in turn infused the arts of the fin de siècle with an aura of expectancy, challenging them to induce musical effects by their own means. With each art aspiring to produce the effects of another artistic medium, a synesthetic yearning ran like a shiver through the body of art that would emerge over the next half century. Rasula traces this pan-arts polyphony from German Romantic theory to early experiments in ""visual music,"" encompassing such diverse phenomena as American fixation on Arcadia, early film theory, and the lure of the fourth dimension. All the while, he keeps focus on the paramount historical consequence in elevating music to a new universal aesthetic standard, arguing that Wagnerism was first among modern ""isms.""In surveying this momentous interplay among arts, History of a Shiver ranges from literature, music and painting to theatre, cinema, dance, photography, and civic pageantry. It retells the story of modernism by recovering not an idea, but a feeling--the hair-raising potential for each painting, literary text, or musical composition to herald an unprecedented domain of human enterprise.

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9780199396290

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Reviews

Jed Rasula's History of a Shiver fundamentally rewrites the genealogy of modernism. Much studied, modernism has become comfortably familiar. Rasula's vastly learned and lucid study defamiliarizes it again, recovering the inherent strangeness and polymorphism of modernist art and aesthetics and embedding them in a dazzling network of cross-references--some inevitable, some surprising, some long forgotten, but all fascinating. --Lawrence Kramer, author of Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge Jed Rasula's History of a Shiver makes a handsome addition to the growing corpus of modernist criticism. A compelling cultural history that brings many polyphonic strands of debate together, it provides a necessary refinement of both modernism's history and the interplay of its constituent ideas. --Simon Shaw-Miller, author of Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage Rasula has composed a book of striking intellectual virtuosity and wide historical reach. The unsettlements of Modernism--its mixing of forms, its synesthestic longings, its Wagnerism, its unreconciled self-surpassing vigor-have never been more vividly rendered. Written with a verve and provocation worthy of its subject, History of a Shiver deserves immediate attention and long patient study. --Michael Levenson, author of Modernism

Breathtaking and beautifully written, Jed Rasulas History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism is a masterpiece of modernist criticism. Drawing on a vast archive of texts, paintings, scripts, scores, and historical anecdotes, Rasula traces the genealogies of modernism across the arts. * Modern Language Association *

Author Information

Jed Rasula is Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century, Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth, and Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry, among others.

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