Slapstick Modernism

""The book's central concept is unprecedented and, once explained, it seems quite extraordinary that no one has fleshed it out before. This is clearly a work of scope and insight whose ideas will have considerable applicability.""--Juan Suárez, author of Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday ""Solomon not only articulates a new category for understanding literary history, but ranges easily and provocatively across a wide and deep archive to show why that history matters.""--Matthew Stratton, author of The Politics of Irony in American Modernism ""An exciting, fresh study. Solomon illuminates the historical relationships between aesthetic modernism and anarchic screen comedy--unlikely allies in an attempt to negotiate, and survive, the sensory experiences of modernity. Brimming with attractions but absent conceptual pratfalls, the book also makes a compelling case for why, when modernism returns to U.S. artistic practices in late 1950s and 1960s, it often does so in the key of Keaton and Keystone. Solomon's revisionist account of modernism as a space of inspired immaturity and embodied lunacy is a joy to read.""--Justus Nieland, co-author of Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization