Slapstick Modernism

"The book's central concept is unprecedented and, once explained, it seems quite extraordinary that no one has fleshed it out before. This is clearly a work of scope and insight whose ideas will have considerable applicability."--Juan Surez, author of Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday "Slapstick Modernism uses a fresh and innovative methodology to examine the ways comic films influenced the experimental principals of artists and thinkers from the high modernism of the early 1920s through to the Beat generation."--The Year's Work in American Humor Studies "Admirably organized and beautifully written, it is stylistically uncontaminated by the frenetic lunacy it describes. It traces modernist literary experimentation and coterminous cinematic physical comedy, until the two parallel tracks merge in the final chapter to form a single phenomenon, "slapstick modernism."--TLS "Slapstick Modernism is a study of little remarked aesthetic influences, fascinating for articulating tendencies that should have been obvious (but were not)."--Shepherd Express "An ambitious book, Slapstick Modernism delineates a new literary sub-genre, arguing that physical humor becomes a way of undermining economic rationalism. . . . Recommended."--Choice "Solomon not only articulates a new category for understanding literary history, but ranges easily and provocatively across a wide and deep archive to show why that history matters."--Matthew Stratton, author of The Politics of Irony in American Modernism "An exciting, fresh study. Solomon illuminates the historical relationships between aesthetic modernism and anarchic screen comedy--unlikely allies in an attempt to negotiate, and survive, the sensory experiences of modernity. Brimming with attractions but absent conceptual pratfalls, the book also makes a compelling case for why, when modernism returns to U.S. artistic practices in late 1950s and 1960s, it often does so in the key of Keaton and Keystone. Solomon's revisionist account of modernism as a space of inspired immaturity and embodied lunacy is a joy to read."--Justus Nieland, co-author of Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization

William Solomon is an associate professor of English at the University of Buffalo.