Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

Ewa Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Buffalo. She is the author of An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy and coeditor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis and Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art, Politics.

Elegantly argued and often brilliant in its handling of diverse theoretical traditions, Ewa Ziarek's book will speak equally to those interested in the longer history of post-Kantian art-philosophy and to those working in the more recent discourses of critical theory. A major contribution to several scholarly fields and likely to become a touchstone for those seeking rigorous yet enabling language for the ways in which modernism continues to matter. -- Dan Blanton, University of California, Berkeley In her rich, persuasive, and provocative new book, Ewa Ziarek moves between Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, negotiates between Theodor Adorno and feminist theory, plays off Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Ranciere against Julia Kristeva and Rita Felski, to develop one central argument: that, to paraphrase Karl Marx, whereas aestheticians have only interpreted the world, now the time has come to change it, and this will happen when the revolutionary potential of art is unleashed by allying itself with feminist critique. -- Jean-Michel Rabate, University of Pennsylvania Bringing together multiple theoretical perspectives in this rich, persuasive and elegant text, Ziarek therefore confronts impossible destruction in order to inaugurate new possibilities of writing and becoming. Culture Machine Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism is an exceptional contribution to modernist studies; no other work to date presents us with such a methodological challenge. Differences A significant contribution to the field of modernist and feminist studies, hopefully spurring a new approach to this field of research. Virginia Woolf Miscellany

• Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: On Loss 1Revolutionary Praxis and Its Melancholic Impasses 1. On Suffrage Militancy and Modernism: Femininity and Revolt 2. Melancholia 3. Woolf's Aesthetics of Potentiality 2Female Bodies Introduction: Rethinking the Form/Matter Divide in Feminist Politics and Aesthetics 4. Abstract Commodity Form and Bare Life 5. Damaged Materialities in Political Struggles and Aesthetic Innovations 3Toward a Feminine Aesthetics of Renaissance 6. The Enigma of Nella Larsen: Letters Notes Index