Thomas Keller 
Wyndham Lewis and British Art Rock [PDF ebook] 
A Practicological Modernism

This study connects the idiosyncratic modernism of Wyndham Lewis, co-founder of the Vorticist art movement, with works of several artists from the British art rock tradition, among them Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, art-punk pioneers Wire and electronic pop musician John Foxx. By taking a transdisciplinary and intermedial approach to texts from two fields normally studied in isolation and staking out the elements of a shared modernist ethos, the book presents a new perspective on both fields relevant to scholars of literature, popular culture, and the visual arts alike. While the book rests on sound research from the fields of literary criticism, art history, and pop theory, the structure and writing of the book is fundamentally designed to be accessible and comprehensible to non-scholarly readers.

Table of Content

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Modernism as an Ethos
1. ‘Violent Structure of Adolescent Clearness’: Wyndham Lewis and the Art-Punk of Wire
2. The Demonology of Progress: From Un-Radical Modernism to Non-Moral Satire
3. An ‘Antynomy of Opposite Principles’: Englishness and the Practicological Approach in the Historiographies of British Art and Pop
4. How to Survive in an Artless World: From Wyndham Lewis’s Machine-Personae to David Bowie’s Artist-as-Artificer.
5. Personality as Surface
Conclusion: The Moronic Inferno of Modernity
Bibliography
Illustration
Illustration Credits

About the author

Dr. Thomas Keller lehrt englische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften an der Universität Zürich.