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Carole Bourne-Taylor and Ariane Mildenberg, eds. Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. xiii + 390 pp.
Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond is a stimulating contribution to the understanding of the links between phenomenology and modern aesthetics. The thirteen essays in this dense volume offer penetrating insights into the theoretical works by Maurice Merleau- Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard, Paul Ricoeur, and others. The authors of the essays work in a wide range of fields that include literature, philosophy, architecture, theology, and musicology. Their aim is to relate artistic experimentation to the innovative systems of perception, mass (re)production, and consumption that transformed all political, social, and cultural landscapes in the twentieth century. A common denominator is the investigation of the complex relation between phenomenology and art throughout the twentieth century. The essays are grouped in five parts that explore the tenets of phenomenology regarding issues like subjectivity, space, time, perception, and artistic creation observed through the prism of Modernism, Postmodernism, and Transmodernism.
In the preface, Kevin Hart contends that a phenomenological approach to modernist artworks provides better access to the artist's experience of the world. He also claims that it has broadened our critical scope, making us aware of the true nature of the rich artwork: it proceeds from a sense of being-in-the-world combined with imagination, perceptual knowledge, and intuition, independent of time and place. This argument is further developed in Carole Bourne- Taylor and Ariane Mildenberg's illuminating introduction that is both a tour-d'horizon and a thorough examination of a phenomenological rationale. There, the editors show how the crisis of modernity crystallized the preoccupations corn from the quick expansion of industry and capital in the western world. Bourne-Taylor and Mildenberg place the roots of phenomenology in the rift between the modern self and the age of commodity when art, deprived of its aura, was desublimated, and conventional values dissolved. The analysis of...