From the first stirrings of modernism to contemporary poetics, the
modernist aesthetic project could be described as a form of
phenomenological reduction that attempts to return to the invisible and
unsayable foundations of human perception and expression, prior to
objective points of view and scientific notions. It is this aspect of
modernism that this book brings to the fore. The essays presented here
bring into focus the contemporary face of ongoing debates about
phenomenology and modernism. The contributors forcefully underline the
intertwining of modernism and phenomenology and the extent to which the
latter offers a clue to the former.
The book presents the viewpoints of a range of internationally
distinguished critics and scholars, with diverse but closely related
essays covering a wide range of fields, including literature,
architecture, philosophy and musicology. The collection addresses
critical questions regarding the relationship between phenomenology and
modernism, with reference to thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Michel Henry and Paul Ricoeur. By
examining the contemporary philosophical debates, this
cross-disciplinary body of research reveals the pervasive and
far-reaching influence of phenomenology, which emerges as a heuristic
method to articulate modernist aesthetic concerns.
