Visions of the Human: Art, World War I and the Modernist Subject

(Hardback)

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In what ways do the artistic avant-garde's representations of the human body reflect the catastrophe of World War I The European modernists were inspired by developments in the nineteenth-century, yielding new forms of knowledge about the nature of reality and repositioning the human body as the new 'object' of knowledge. New 'visions' of the human subject were created within this transformation. However, modernity's reactionary political climate - for which World War I provided a catalyst - transformed a once liberal ideal between humanity, environment, and technology, into a tool of disciplinary rationalisation. Visions of the Human considers the consequences of this historical moment for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It explores the ways in which the 'technologies of the self' that inspired the avant-garde were increasingly instrumentalised by conservative politics, urbanism, consumer capitalism and the society of 'the spectacle'. This is an engaging and powerful study which challenges prior ideas and explores new ways of thinking about modern visual culture.

Reviews

'Tom Slevin's Visions of the Human is a well-written and rigorously researched analysis of the various practices of visuality that have contributed to the positioning of the human body in the modern era. Slevin offers an exceptionally significant statement outlining the centrality of visual culture to the embodiment of human subjectivity. The image and the body are not simply analyzed here, rather their interrelationships are shown to be the active determinant in how we have come to know ourselves as human subjects. A remarkable aspect of this book is its impressive range of phenomenological and critical theory approaches to the study of the human. This is essential reading for anyone interested in visual culture and theories of embodiment.', Kelli Fuery, Assistant Professor at Chapman University; 'Visions of the Human provides a cogent and compelling reappraisal of the imagination and experience of the body under the extreme historical pressures of world war and industrial modernity', Dr. Christopher Townsend, FRSA, Professor of the History of Avant-Garde Film, Royal Holloway

Author Bio

Tom Slevin is Critical Theory Programme Leader and Lecturer in Cultural and Contextual Studies at the University of Creative Arts, Kent, UK. He is also Lecturer in Photography at Southampton Solent University.