Modernism and Phenomenology

"Modernism and Phenomenology brilliantly reveals the "epiphanic moments" at the heart of mundane experience, moments that rupture taken-for-granted ways of perceiving and that lead us to interrogate anew the world revealed through them. Creatively interlacing original readings of Modernist writers and artists including Woolf, Stein, Stevens, Hopkins, Kafka, Cezanne, and Klee with important phenomenological insights offered by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and their interlocutors, Mildenberg brings modernism and phenomenology into a sustained, and extremely productive conversation that is long overdue. "Both phenomenology and modernism" she persuasively demonstrates, "thrive in the blend of insecurity and possibility." In an aesthetic, literary, and philosophical tour de force, Mildenberg carries her readers alongside her as she wades deep into this fertile realm of "prelogical muddiness," or "wild being": the flesh of the world whose waves and folds comprise infinite material for creative expression." (Gail Weiss, The George Washington University, USA)

Close readings of works by Paul Cézanne, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Paul Klee, and Virginia Woolf explore how modernist texts and artworks display a deep-rooted openness to the world that turns us into "perpetual beginners."

Braiding together strands of literary, phenomenological and art historical reflection, Modernism and Phenomenology explores the ways in which modernist writers and artists return us to wonder before the world. Taking such wonder as the motive for phenomenology itself, and challenging extant views of modernism that uphold a mind-world opposition rooted in Cartesian thought, the book considers the work of modernists who, far from  presenting perfect, finished models for life and the self, embrace raw and semi-chaotic experience. Close readings of works by Paul Cézanne, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Paul Klee, and Virginia Woolf explore how modernist texts and artworks display a deep-rooted openness to the world that turns us into "perpetual beginners." Pushing back against ideas of modernism as fragmentation or groundlessness, Mildenberg argues that this openness is less a sign of powerlessness and deferred meaning than of the very provisionality of experience.