ENGL 262: American Moderns (HC) Fall 2013

Vorticism was the only British avant-garde movement to make an original contribution to European Modernism. Founded in 1914 by Wyndham Lewis, and christened by Ezra Pound, the movement was a sustained act of aggression against the moribund and moderate Victorianism that Lewis and Pound saw as stifling the artistic energies of the new generation in England.

Wyndham Lewis (18821957), arguably the most significant British artist-writer of the 20th century, pioneered cutting-edge modernism in Britain before World War I, helping to turn London into an international vortex of creative activity. Yet he is unknown to many general readers and misunderstood by many specialists. Extensively illustrated, this is the first introduction to explore his work as both a writer and a painter, and to discuss his ideas about art, life, and politics.

Charting the history of the Modernist Magazine in Britain, North America, and Europe, this collection offers the first comprehensive study of the wide and varied range of 'little magazines' which were so instrumental in introducing the new writing and ideas that came to constitute literary and artistic modernism.

Blast Counterblast is a multifaceted, fascinating examination of the way intellectuals interact-through influence, through argumentation, and through criticism. Looking at both Wyndham Lewis's modernist publication BLAST and Marshall McLuhan's 1969 response to it, COUNTERBLAST, the contributors to this volume—a selection of writers, visual artists, performers, and filmmakers-skewer relational aesthetics and identity politics in order to restate what the role of identity formation is today.