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Reading Late Wyndham Lewis
- Author(s):
- John Whittier-Ferguson (see profile)
- Date:
- 2016
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- Wyndham Lewis, fascism, surface reading, cold modernism, Modernism, Posthumanism
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M66M3338S
- Abstract:
- Focused on the criticism of the later writings of Wyndham Lewis, this essay argues that Lewis’s response to the ruining of Enlightenment hopes and promises in the Great War resulted in impassioned polemics and fictions that interrogate the possibility of humanist resistance to the brutalities of modernity. Lewis continues to inspire unusually heated, combative critical exchanges, particularly regarding his notorious if fairly short-lived intellectual and political embrace of fascism. Defenses of Lewis’s late writing are easiest to make when one maintains some distance from the details of Lewis’s texts themselves. Focusing on the example of Jessica Burstein’s Cold Modernism and the kinds of reading enabled by her approach to Lewis’s work, this essay concludes with the suggestion that an “ahumanist,” “cold” Lewis may well be on the cusp of a new season of fruitful attention from the academy.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Book Show details
- Pub. DOI:
- 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.92
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Pub. Date:
- 2016-3-11
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 5 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
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