Futurism And Vorticism Essay

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Italian Futurism and English Vorticism are generally considered to be Modernist movements. Indeed, literary scholar Peter Childs includes Futurism and Vorticism in his seminal book aptly titled Modernism, placing them amongst other Modernist movements like Expressionism, Surrealism, and Dadaism (14). In one of Childs’s many definitions of Modernism, he argues that the movement is imbued with “radical aesthetics, technical experimentation, spatial or rhythmic rather than chronological form, self-conscious reflexiveness, scepticism towards the idea of a centered human subject, and a sustained inquiry into the uncertainty of reality” (18). Certainly, Futurism and Vorticism utilize these Modernist elements in order to radically “break from the past” (30); however, there are certain characteristics that may suggest that Futurism, and in some ways Vorticism as well, transgresses traditional definitions of Modernism. Futurism does not merely profess this Modernist scepticism towards the centered human subject, but professes a profound exaltation of …show more content…
These movements tease apart the human/nonhuman binary through their use of transhuman figures. This approach fully materializes later in 20th century Postmodern and Posthumanist thinking, with the likes of theorists Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, and biologist Julian Huxley, who coined the term “transhumanism” in his essay of the same name. Just as Postmodernist thinking argues for the necessity of deconstructing categories and the ways of thinking built upon them, Futurism and Vorticism’s categorization as Modernist must be rethought. In the same way that the transhuman is neither human nor machine and at the same time human and machine, Futurism and Vorticism are neither Modern nor Postmodern, while at the same time both Modern and Postmodern, calling into question the accuracy of established traditions of art and

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