Book Series: Theories of Modernism & Postmodernism in the Visual Arts
This series is sponsored by History of Art (UCC) and published by Routledge (New York).
It is intended as an opportunity for major scholars in the field to consider the shape of the twentieth century: its essential and marginal moments, its optimal narratives, the strengths and weaknesses of its self descriptions.
It is hoped that the series as a whole will be helpful for those who find that it can be revealing to put a little pressure on the assumptions that are made in everyday scholarship regarding what is, and isn’t, crucial to an understanding of twentieth-century art.
The books in this series were originally lectures, each given at University College Cork over a period of three years (2004-6). The authors were each encouraged to respond to previous efforts: the notion was that the series might grow to resemble a protracted exchange, in which each person has months or years to consider how to respond to what has been said. That speed seems entirely appropriate to a subject as intricate, and as prone to overly quick assertions, as this. Readers may begin the series with any book, but taken as a whole, and read in sequence, the series is intended as perhaps the world’s slowest and best-pondered conversation on modernism.
Volume 1: James Elkins, Master Narratives and Their Discontents (2005)
Volume 2: Stephen Bann, Ways Around Modernism (2006)
Volume 3: Richard Shiff, Doubt (2007)
Volume 4: Joseph Koerner, Last Experience of Painting (forthcoming)
Volume 5: Pamela Lee, Postmodernism & the Cybernetic Imagination (forthcoming)
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Series Preface
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