Nico Israel's superb Spirals revisits a history of modernity whose most secret desires and powerful realizations are captured by the dialectical image of the spiral. Not just echoes of Baroque forms, modernist spirals fascinate with endless lines and infinite dynamism. From Tatlin's Constructivism to Yeats's gyres, from Duchamp's Rotoreliefs to Smithson's Spiral Jetty, from Ubu's helical paunch to Kentridge's whirling cartoons, we rediscover works that renew our understanding of the world.
Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsyvlania Nico Israel's brilliant Spirals skyrockets across the extreme twentieth century to land with utmost illumination in our own. In tensile prose as elegant as it is urgent, as sinuous as it is conceptually agile, and with a dazzling command of the multiple languages, disciplines, and global remit of modernity, Israel reveals how embedded the spiral is in the tissue of modern thought and ethics, and how important it is as a mode of reading the world. Breaking through the silo of our understanding, the vibrant matter Israel sets whirling in this crucial book is nothing less than a world future, a spiraling ring of agency that encircles and enacts a commons.
Jennifer Wicke, University of Virginia As it transversely curves from one plane of inquiry to another, this book brilliantly enacts its central insight and mystery: the path of artistic inquiry offered, and accepted, by the spiral. Nico Israel is a wonderful stylist of perception, and this is a joyful and profound work.
Joseph O'Neill, Bard College, author of Netherland Elegantly written, theoretically sophisticated... Israel's ground-breaking work... may have scholars in Modernist Studies, Comparative Literature, and Visual Culture seeing spirals everywhere.
Adrienne Janus Modern Language Review Stunningly ambitious... Israel's book opens up a number of new avenues for investigation.
Roger Rothman Modernism/modernity