From the invention of skyscrapers and airplanes to the development of the nuclear bomb, ideas about the "modern" increasingly revolved around vertiginous images of elevation and decline and new technologies of mobility and terror from above. The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis ofTransatlantic Modernism explores this by focusing on discourses of aspiration, catastrophe, and power in major works of European and American literature as well as film, architecture, and intellectual and cultural history. This wide-ranging and pointed study begins with canonical fiction by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and John Dos Passos, as well as poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, and Aime Cesaire, before continuing on to European travel writings about the rise of New York City, the Americanfilms of Alfred Hitchcock, and postwar novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among many other remarkable examples. Tracing the rise and fall of modernist discourse over the course of the long twentieth century, this book argues that ideas of vertical ascension and powerincreasingly turned from an emphasis on nature, religion, and the body to culture, technology, and the "spirit of capitalism." In turn, by showing how spectacles of height and flight became not only symbolic icons of ambition but also direct indexes of power, it argues that the modernist verticalimagination was both material and imagined, taking place at the same time through the rapidly expanding built environment as well as critical ideological discourses about the "high" and the "low." | The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism by Paul Haacke, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters