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.
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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.
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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.
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Essays on historiography, historical time, and anthropology of time.
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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.
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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.
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Multiauthored Books by Tyrus Miller
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ...
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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 ...
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The Bloomsbury Companion to Modern Literature, 2018
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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).
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Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements, Ed. Aleš Erjavec, 2015
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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.
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Books by Tyrus Miller
Multiauthored Books by Tyrus Miller
Video lectures and interviews by Tyrus Miller
Papers by Tyrus Miller