Tyrus Miller | University of California, Irvine (original) (raw)

Books by Tyrus Miller

Georg Lukács and Critical Theory: Aesthetic, History, Utopia (open access e-book), 2022

This book examines the heritage of critical theory from the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg L... more This book examines the heritage of critical theory from the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács through the early Frankfurt School up to current issues of authoritarian politics and democratisation. Interweaving discussion of art and literature, utopian thought, and the dialectics of high art and mass culture, it offers unique perspectives on an interconnected group of left-wing intellectuals who sought to understand and resist their society's systemic impoverishment of thought and experience. Starting from Lukács’s reflections on art, utopia, and historical action, it progresses to the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s analyses of music, media, avant-garde and kitsch. It concludes with discussions of erotic utopia, authoritarianism, postsocialism, and organised deceit in show trials – topics in which the legacy of Lukács and Frankfurt School critical theory continues to be relevant today.

This new series of monographs reflects the range of recent research in modernist studies, contrib... more This new series of monographs reflects the range of recent research in modernist studies, contributing to the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural expansion of the field.

Includes Lukács' book Literature and Democracy (1947) in full, along with five supplementary essa... more Includes Lukács' book Literature and Democracy (1947) in full, along with five supplementary essays and lectures published between 1946 and 1948; with introduction, annotations, and biographical and historical glossary. These appear for the first time in English; many have not been translated even into German; several pieces are "occasional" works published only in pamphlets or other ephemeral form.

Considers alternative modes of figuring historical time in modernist cultural theory and artworks... more Considers alternative modes of figuring historical time in modernist cultural theory and artworks. Includes essays on dream theory in Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin and architecture, the Mass Observation dream archive, figures of childhood in historical films, the Brothers Quay and Bruno Schulz, Sergei Eisenstein’s and Charles Olson’s confrontation with Mexico and hieroglyphic audio-visual poetics, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s relation to Antonio Gramsci.

Essays on historiography, historical time, and anthropology of time.

Discusses shift in the politics of the avant-garde after World War II. I argue that the utopian ... more Discusses shift in the politics of the avant-garde after World War II. I argue that the utopian aspirations of the avant-garde are refocused on providing singular, non-binding examples of alternative ways of seeing, thinking, and experiencing everyday life. Chapters on John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, Gilbert Sorrentino, Samuel Beckett.

My book features two major sections: "Theorizing Late Modernism," in which I develop a revisionar... more My book features two major sections: "Theorizing Late Modernism," in which I develop a revisionary model for examining the literary culture of the 1930s, and "Reading Late Modernism," which offers detailed interpretations of works by Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, and Samuel Beckett. I trace the emergence during the 1920s and 30s of a critical "late modernist" strain of fiction and reveal how later modernist writers rejected crucial precepts of modernist aesthetics and articulated an alternative mode of writing presaging post-modern forms of textuality. In the opening section (two chapters), I discuss historiographic problems raised by the 1930s culture of transition and define the nature of late modernist forms. I then offer a contextual view of the changed situation for modernist writers beginning their careers in the late 1920s. These writers shared a sense of a progressive "derealization" of reality through spectacle and responded by employing literary forms based on "reduced laughter" (Bakhtin) as an antidote to the vertiginous loss of a stable social ground. In the interpretive section I discuss in individual chapters the works of Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, and Mina Loy, developing the theoretical and historical perspectives of the previous section.

Multiauthored Books by Tyrus Miller

Video lectures and interviews by Tyrus Miller

Tyrus Miller as editor of the Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis discusses Lewis and his multif... more Tyrus Miller as editor of the Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis discusses Lewis and his multifaceted works.

Papers by Tyrus Miller

Open Philosophy, 2024

This study explores the pivotal concept of "objective possibility" within Lukács's History and Cl... more This study explores the pivotal concept of "objective possibility" within Lukács's History and Class Consciousness, a concept that has received less attention compared to more prominent ideas such as reification or totality. Lukács frequently refers to "objective possibility" and related terms in essays like "What Is Orthodox Marxism?" and "Class Consciousness," emphasizing its importance in understanding class consciousness theoretically. The term's roots for Lukács derive from Max Weber's methodological writings, which drew from John Stuart Mill and Johannes von Kries and applied to historical and social causation. However, Lukács diverges from Weber's use, focusing not on counterfactual historical events but on latent historical tensions in the present that can be actualized through collective action. The study argues that Lukács integrates Weberian objective possibility with Marxist and Hegelian language, utilizing it within a modal social ontology. This approach allows Lukács to theorize key questions of class consciousness, historical action, and revolution. By drawing on Hegel's dialectics of possibility, actuality, and necessity, as well as Marxian contradictions in material conditions, Lukács reconfigures objective possibility from a heuristic tool for the writing of history to an ontologically significant element in the field of historical action.

Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies www.wyndhamlewis.org, 2019

The paper discusses Wyndham Lewis's short-lived post-WWI journal The Tyro, which occupies a criti... more The paper discusses Wyndham Lewis's short-lived post-WWI journal The Tyro, which occupies a critically under-discussed position in Lewis's artistic and literary corpus. I argue that the notion of the "tyro," a beginner or novice, and its inflection by Lewis as a satirical figure of arrested development, is performatively reflected in the structure and themes of the journal itself.

On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music, 2012

Early in his treatise On the Sublime, Longinus recounts three faults ofwriting that “militate aga... more Early in his treatise On the Sublime, Longinus recounts three faults ofwriting that “militate against sublimity”: tumidity, or misplaced grandeur; puerility, or pedantic frigidity in elaborating an idea; and false sentiment (102–3). He goes on in his chapter on “the ...

On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music, 2012

The Bloomsbury Companion to Modern Literature, 2018

College Literature 45/2, 2018

This essay discusses utopian interpretations of Sade and Fourier in German Critical Theory (Benja... more This essay discusses utopian interpretations of Sade and Fourier in German Critical Theory (Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse) and French Theory (Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski).

Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements, Ed. Aleš Erjavec, 2015

Modernist Cultures 12.3 (2017): 331–344. This essay reconsiders Reyner Banham's classic study of ... more Modernist Cultures 12.3 (2017): 331–344. This essay reconsiders Reyner Banham's classic study of early twentieth-century architecture and design, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, originally published in 1960. Banham surveyed the architecture, design, and visual arts of the 'first machine age', characterized by industrial production and motorized transportation, from a self-consciously thematized perspective within the 'second machine age', populated by expendable consumer technologies and images. This revisionist perspective enabled Banham to challenge long-standing myths propagated by the dominant figures of the modern movement. In his polemical emphasis on the contingency and plurality of that which had empirically transpired in first machine age, Banham rejected the reduction of the messy history of the modern movement to the victory of a putative 'international style'. Banham reasserted the intimate connection of architectural modernism with the avant-garde artistic movements of the 1910s and 20s, emphasizing particularly the most radical ones such as expressionism, futurism, and dadaism.

Georg Lukács and Critical Theory: Aesthetic, History, Utopia (open access e-book), 2022

Essays on historiography, historical time, and anthropology of time.

Open Philosophy, 2024

Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies www.wyndhamlewis.org, 2019

On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music, 2012

The Bloomsbury Companion to Modern Literature, 2018

College Literature 45/2, 2018

Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements, Ed. Aleš Erjavec, 2015

An essay in RETRACING THE PAST: Historical continuity in aesthetics from a global perspective, Ye... more An essay in RETRACING THE PAST: Historical continuity in aesthetics from a global perspective, Yearbook of the International Association for Aesthetics, ed. Zoltán Somhegyi, vol 19, 2017. 107-117.

Discusses the broader span of late modernism's development from the 1930s until the recent past, ... more Discusses the broader span of late modernism's development from the 1930s until the recent past, using Beckett's work as an orienting pivot.

A survey of literary theory related to time.

Discusses utopian writer and architectural theorist Paul Scheerbart, with particular focus on his... more Discusses utopian writer and architectural theorist Paul Scheerbart, with particular focus on his writings about the utopian potential of glass as a building material.

This paper considers the place of visual arts in the aesthetics of the Hungarian Marxist philosop... more This paper considers the place of visual arts in the aesthetics of the Hungarian Marxist philosopher and critic György Lukács, including in his early aesthetics and following World War II.

In Eimi, his poetic, typographically experimental prose memoir of a 1931 trip to the Soviet Union... more In Eimi, his poetic, typographically experimental prose memoir of a 1931 trip to the Soviet Union, E. E. Cummings measured his subjective “I-me” against the collectivist values and bureaucratized realities of the only existing socialist society of his time. His book overlays an allegorical Dantean descent into inferno with detailed, diary-like treatment of Cummings’ encounters with various Communist Party officials, Soviet cultural intellectuals, and American political fellow-travellers and tourists. Although later in his life, Cummings would increasingly embrace a simple, binary hostility to communism, at the moment of Eimi his position is more complex with respect to the questions of communism and anti-communism. His experimental prose technique allows him a powerfully reflexive autobiographical voice that plays freely between attraction to and repulsion from his experiences in the Soviet Union. Especially focusing on his relations to other Americans in the U.S.S.R., Cummings makes his primary object of critical scrutiny not so much the Soviet system itself, as the willingness of liberal American intellectuals to embrace and make apology for that system, which openly disdained their liberal values and portended their ultimate liquidation.

Modernism Revisited, special issue of Filosofski Vestnik (Philosophical Notebooks), Ljubljana, 2014

This essay focuses on the writings of the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri, who was at the... more This essay focuses on the writings of the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri, who was at the center of a group of historians and theorists at the University of Venice’s School of Architecture. It considers how his works dealing with the avant-garde, especially Architecture and Utopia and The Sphere and the Labyrinth, develop a historical-critical method to identify and explicate the gap between the evolution of ideologies of the avant-garde and their translation into a repertoire of techniques that have divergent histories and social meanings than those posited by avant-garde ideologies. In doing so, Tafuri is not just offering an “ideology-critique” of modernism, revealing the way that the avant-garde failed to fulfill its postulated social and aesthetic goals; he is also arguing metahistorically, that via a dialectic of the avant-garde, twentieth-century capitalist modernity weaves an ideological fabric of modernism and interleaves it into the effective structure of reality, for instance through the practices of architecture and urbanism. Thus, “modernism” becomes a relevant term of periodization, not because of the historical veracity of any orthodox art historical narrative of the succession or progressive evolution of modernist forms, but insofar as “modernism” designates the symptomatic tension between the progressive history of avant-garde forms and the heterogeneous technical history that represents how the avant-garde’s formal programs were actualized.

The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazine, Vol 3, Europe 1880-1940., 2013

Discussion of Hungarian avant-garde periodicals from WWI to early 1930s: A Tett, Ma, Egység, Akas... more Discussion of Hungarian avant-garde periodicals from WWI to early 1930s: A Tett, Ma, Egység, Akasztott Ember, 2x2, Ék, Is, 365, Dokumentum, Munka.

Review of Literature, Modernism, and Dance by Susan Jones. 2013, Oxford UP, in Dance Research Jo... more Review of Literature, Modernism, and Dance by Susan Jones. 2013, Oxford UP, in Dance Research Journal, Volume 47, Number 1, April 2015, pp. 103-106.

On the role of images in philosophical discourse.

Textual Practice 10/2, 1996

Modern Language Notes (MLN) 103/5, 1988

Art Lies, Issue 63, 2010.

Textual Practice 11/3, 1997

Modernism / Modernity 17.4, 2010

Twentieth-Century Literature, 2008

In 1961, poet Jackson Mac Low composed Nuclei for Simone Morris (later retitled Nuclei for Simone... more In 1961, poet Jackson Mac Low composed Nuclei for Simone Morris (later retitled Nuclei for Simone Forti), a dance piece that derived a set of actions by selecting verbs from a word list according to a set procedure. Mac Low's Nuclei began from a poet's reflection on the complex interrelations of different media of meaning-making-language, writing, sound, movement-and what kinds of creative "translations" can occur when one seeks to cross from one sign-system to the other and back. True to their name, the Nuclei not only constructed a framework of instructions for developing different instantiations of that one work; they also generated a whole new set of texts, The Pronouns,[1] utilizing the same underlying materials (the action card pack) and analogous, though further elaborated procedures for deriving texts and performances from them. The number of Mac Low's texts, forty, related to a list of English-language pronouns, whereby each of the texts is organized around a single pronoun, ranging from the obvious "I," "you," and "we," to more complex ones such as "who," "nobody," "either," and "whichever." These combine with other words to make texts with a somewhat Gertrude Stein-like flavor, combining phrases such as "Someone then says things as a worm would, / but also as one keeping sheep or seeing an offer, / while willing themselves to be dead or coming to see something narrow" (17 th Dance). Among Mac Low's interest in using the pronouns in this way was to explore how certain often-subliminal features of language imply and occasion different sorts of social interaction, segmentation, and identification.

THE HUMANITIES AT WORK: International Exchange of Ideas in Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Literature, 2008

Japanese avant-garde periodical in PDF scan.

Japanese avant-garde periodical of the 1920s.

Japanese avant-garde journal

Japanese avant-garde journal.

Japanese avant-garde periodical

Japanese avant-garde journal, scan.