Thought to be unequivocally different from one another, modern men and women were expected to express their sexuality and social positions in the clothes they wore, the poses they struck, and the behavior they exhibited. In a series of case studies, Bodies of Modernity looks at works by Cezanne, Renoir, Seurat, Tissot, and Caillebotte as well as photographs of male body builders to establish an image of the modern body. Well-known works such as Renoir's Nude in the Sunlight, Seurat's Young Woman Powdering Herself, and Cezanne's Large Bathers are given new interpretations, while lesser known paintings like Tissot's series on The Women of Paris or Caillebotte's iconoclastic Man at the Bath are looked at seriously for the first time.Bodies of Modernity is an original account of one of the best-loved periods in Western art history. By taking "figure and flesh" as its focus, it bypasses traditional art historical categories and style labels to provide a reading of the work of the Impressionists and their contemporaries that gets to the heart of French society of the period.

In this incisive and truly impressive book, Ian Burkitt critically addresses the dualism between mind and body, thought and emotion, rationality and irrationality, and the mental and the material, which haunt the post-Cartesian world. Drawing on the work of contemporary social theorists and feminist writers, he argues that thought and the sense of being a person is inseparable from bodily practices within social relations, even though such active experience may be abstracted and expanded upon through the use of symbols. Overcoming classic dualisms in social thought, Burkitt argues that bodies are not purely the constructs of discourses of power: they are also productive, communicative, and invested with powerful capacities for changing the social and natural worlds. He goes on to consider how such powers can be developed in more ethical forms of relations and activities.

In Power in Modernity, Isaac Ariail Reed proposes a bold new theory of power that describes overlapping networks of delegation and domination. Chains of power and their representation, linking together groups and individuals across time and space, create a vast network of intersecting alliances, subordinations, redistributions, and violent exclusions. Reed traces the common action of “sending someone else to do something for you” as it expands outward into the hierarchies that control territories, persons, artifacts, minds, and money. He mobilizes this theory to investigate the onset of modernity in the Atlantic world, with a focus on rebellion, revolution, and state formation in colonial North America, the early American Republic, the English Civil War, and French Revolution. Modernity, Reed argues, dismantled the “King’s Two Bodies”—the monarch’s physical body and his ethereal, sacred second body that encompassed the body politic—as a schema of representation for forging power relations. Reed’s account then offers a new understanding of the democratic possibilities and violent exclusions forged in the name of “the people,” as revolutionaries sought new ways to secure delegation, build hierarchy, and attack alterity. Reconsidering the role of myth in modern politics, Reed proposes to see the creative destruction and eternal recurrence of the King’s Two Bodies as constitutive of the modern attitude, and thus as a new starting point for critical theory. Modernity poses in a new way an eternal human question: what does it mean to be the author of one’s own actions?

Reveals the links, both positive and negative, between disabled bodies and aspects of modernism and modernity through readings of a wide range of literary texts

The aim of this book is to provide an account of modernist painting that follows on from the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno. It offers a materialist account of modernism with detailed discussions of modern aesthetics from Kant to Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Adorno. It discusses in detail competing accounts of modernism: Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Yve-Alain Bois, and Thierry de Duve; and it discusses several painters and artists in detail: Pieter de Hooch, Jackson Pollock, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, and Chaim Soutine. Its central thesis is that modernist painting exemplifies a form of rationality that is an alternative to the instrumental rationality of enlightened modernity. Modernist paintings exemplify how nature and the sociality of meaning can be reconciled.

The prize-winning War Memorial Gymnasium at the University of British Columbia is discussed here, examining what the building's design, construction and shifting functions reveal about the university's values during the post-war years.

Looks at dance in Germany, France, and the United States during the 1920s and the 1930s, including ballet, modern dance and dance in the cinema and Revue. Artists examined include Josephine Baker, Jean Cocteau, Valeska Gert, and George Balanchine.