Overview

Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism brings into dialogue Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology with modernist art, literature, music, film and neurophysiological discoveries, opening up the complexities of the philosopher’s phenomenology of perception to a broader audience across the arts. An important resource for anyone interested in the links between modernism and philosophy, Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism offers close readings of Merleau-Ponty’s key texts, explores modernist works in light of his thought, and provides an extended glossary of Merleau-Ponty’s central terms and concepts.

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9781501302718

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Reviews

Ariane Mildenberg has compiled an important volume on a topic that is too little explored: Merleau-Ponty's contribution and dialogue with artistic and literary modernism. The authors involved are experts in their respective areas and their offerings reflects this. The result is an important addition both to studies in Merleau-Ponty thought and modernism. * Stephen Watson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, USA *

Ariane Mildenberg has compiled an important volume on a topic that is too little explored: Merleau-Ponty's contribution to and dialogue with artistic and literary modernism. The authors involved are experts in their respective areas and their offerings reflects this. The result is an important addition both to studies in Merleau-Ponty thought and modernism. * Stephen Watson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, USA * This rich and deeply informative collection reveals for the first time Maurice Merleau-Ponty's place at the heart of Modernist explorations of the multifaceted, dynamically intertwining nature of reality. The seven opening chapters explore pivotal texts in which he describes how the arts reach into and open upon what he called the invisible armature or lining and depth of the visible world. From this conceptual grounding twelve central chapters engage Modernist painting, literature, music, and film in dialogue with his thought. They offer a remarkable array of fresh perspectives moving from Matisse and Klee and Cezanne, to writers such as Proust, Valery, Woolf, Joyce, and Beckett, to film and music, and the kind of neurophysiology to which his thinking was always attentive. The final section is an extremely valuable Glossary of concepts such as Flesh, Ecart, Wild (Brute) Being, Perceptual Faith, and Chiasm/Intertwining that are central to Merleau-Ponty's work but difficult to grasp without introduction. * Louise Westling, Professor Emerita of English and Environmental Studies, University of Oregon, USA *

The encounter between Merleau-Ponty and modernism is given added acuity moreover by the fairly recent phenomenological turn in critical theory and the return to Merleau-Ponty's work across a number of fields and tendencies, including queer phenomenology, medical humanities, animal studies, environmental studies, and new materialism. The many contributors to Mildenberg's carefully curated and substantial volume (with nineteen individually authored chapters in all) offer provocative and significant contributions to these ongoing conversations. ... In addition to the many substantial and precise perspectives to be found in the first two parts of the volume, the third part offers a distinctively adventurous series of brief glossary entries, each of them nevertheless essays in their own right. ... a significant and substantial resource for scholars working on Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology, but beyond this it has much to offer to the ongoing re-assessment of modernism and its legacies. -- Patrick Ffrench * French Studies * Ariane Mildenberg has compiled an important volume on a topic that is too little explored: Merleau-Ponty's contribution to and dialogue with artistic and literary modernism. The authors involved are experts in their respective areas and their offerings reflects this. The result is an important addition both to studies in Merleau-Ponty thought and modernism. * Stephen Watson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, USA * This rich and deeply informative collection reveals for the first time Maurice Merleau-Ponty's place at the heart of Modernist explorations of the multifaceted, dynamically intertwining nature of reality. The seven opening chapters explore pivotal texts in which he describes how the arts reach into and open upon what he called the invisible armature or lining and depth of the visible world. From this conceptual grounding twelve central chapters engage Modernist painting, literature, music, and film in dialogue with his thought. They offer a remarkable array of fresh perspectives moving from Matisse and Klee and Cezanne, to writers such as Proust, Valery, Woolf, Joyce, and Beckett, to film and music, and the kind of neurophysiology to which his thinking was always attentive. The final section is an extremely valuable Glossary of concepts such as Flesh, Ecart, Wild (Brute) Being, Perceptual Faith, and Chiasm/Intertwining that are central to Merleau-Ponty's work but difficult to grasp without introduction. * Louise Westling, Professor Emerita of English and Environmental Studies, University of Oregon, USA *

Author Information

Ariane Mildenberg is Senior Lecturer in Modernism at the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of Modernism and Phenomenology: Literature, Philosophy, Art (2017) and co-editor of Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond (2010).

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