June 1st: Paul Haacke in conversation with Adrienne Brown and Nico Israel
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Paul Haacke will be discussing his new book, The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism, with Adrienne Brown and Nico Israel.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, June 1st at 6pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be archived and posted shortly afterwards.
Paul Haacke — The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2021)
From the invention of skyscrapers and airplanes to the development of the nuclear bomb, ideas about the modern increasingly revolved around vertiginous images of elevation and decline and new technologies of mobility and terror from above. In The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism, Paul Haacke examines this turn by focusing on discourses of aspiration, catastrophe, and power in major works of European and American literature as well as film, architecture, and intellectual and cultural history.
This wide-ranging and pointed study begins with canonical fiction by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and John Dos Passos, as well as poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, and Aimé Césaire, before moving to critical reflections on the rise of New York City by architects and writers from Le Corbusier to Simone de Beauvoir, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and theories of cinematic space and time, and postwar novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among many other examples. In tracing the rise and fall of modernist discourse over the course of the long twentieth century, this book shows how visions of vertical ascension turned from established ideas about nature, the body, and religion to growing anxieties about aesthetic distinction, technological advancement, and American capitalism and empire. It argues that spectacles of height and flight became symbols and icons of ambition as well as direct indexes of power, and thus that the vertical transformation of modernity was both material and imagined, taking place at the same time through the rapidly expanding built environment and shifting ideological constructions of "high" and "low."
Born and raised in New York City, Paul Haacke has taught at UC Berkeley, where he received his PhD in Comparative Literature and Film Studies, as well as New York University and the Pratt Institute, where he is currently Adjunct Associate Professor in the Humanities and Media Studies department and the Architecture Writing program. His writing has appeared in a range of publications, including diacritics, French Forum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Thresholds, In These Times, Pin-Up and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. His first book, The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism, is now out from Oxford University Press.
Adrienne Brown is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (2017) and co-editor of Race and Real Estate (2015).
Nico Israel is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College. He is the author of two books, Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art (Columbia University Press), and Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora (Stanford University Press). He has published numerous articles on literature, literary theory and continental philosophy, and over seventy essays on contemporary visual art, many of them for Artforum.