Ebook: Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art

In this elegantly written and beautifully illustrated book, Nico Israel reveals how spirals are at the heart of the most significant literature and visual art of the twentieth century. Juxtaposing the work of writers and artists—including W. B. Yeats and Vladimir Tatlin, James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett and Robert Smithson—he argues that spirals provide a crucial frame for understanding the mutual involvement of modernity, history, and geopolitics.

Nico Israel argues that spirals illuminate the torsions of history and geopolitics within modernity. Taking the form of the spiral not only as his topic but as inspiration for his method, Israel challenges familiar, discipline-based approaches to modernism and its aftermaths and gives twenty-first-century theory an important new spin.