Ewa Płonowska Ziarek. Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

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Ewa Płonowska Ziarek
“In an impressive display of erudition and incisive analysis Feminist 
Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism makes a theoretically 
innovative intervention into the ield of gender, race, aesthetics, 
and politics. An absolutely original and brilliantly conceived book.” 
— Tina Chanter, DePaul University
“A brilliant, unique, and original work. Ewa Ziarek’s sensitive and critical 
analysis of the “multiple possibilities of what literature and femininity 
might mean and might become” asks us to rethink the ways in which 
the relations between aesthetics and politics, race and critical theory, 
feminism and modernism have been commonly understood. This is a 
vital and valuable book and demonstrates how from literature written by 
white and black women new forms of knowledge, transformation, and 
aesthetic possibility can emerge, and new kinds of political and psychic 
sensibility.” — David Marriott, author of Haunted Life: Visual Culture and 
Black Modernity
“Ziarek is a virtuoso voice amongst the continental theorists contrib-
uting to the new directions in aesthetics.” — Penelope Deutscher, 
Northwestern University
Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the 
struggle for freedom in women’s literary and political modernism and 
the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the 
contradiction between women’s transformative literary and political 
practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and 
she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between 
revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction 
between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek’s 
political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruc-
tion of women in politics and literary production and the transformation 
of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. 
Her study is one of the irst to combine an in-depth engagement with 
philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with 
women’s literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf 
and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and 
gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about 
modernism’s experimental forms together with an analysis of violence 
and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic 
subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the apprecia-
tion of art’s emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-
racist political struggles.
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$29.50 / £20.50 978-0-231-16149-7 
2012 288 pages 
Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism
ewa płonowska ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative 
Literature at the State University of New York, Buffalo. She is the author 
of An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of 
Radical Democracy and coeditor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable 
Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis and Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art, Politics.
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