Publication announcement: Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater (Joseph Cermatori '05)

Available for pre-order here:
https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/baroque-modernity

Coming to bookstores November 16, 2021: a groundbreaking study on the vital role of baroque theater in shaping modernist philosophy, literature, and performance.

Winner of the American Comparative Literature Association's 2021 Helen Tartar First Book Award.

Reviews:

“This wondrous work shows that modernism has been mistakenly and consequentially contrasted with the baroque in the service of a secularization narrative and a progressive narrative of periodization. The florid pre-history of spare modernism turns out never fully to fall away and, in Cermatori's splendid account, even the queer theoretical distinction between performative speech acts and theatricality turns out to be a result of that disavowal—and return—of the baroque. A brilliant and unsettling book!”
– Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley
Author of The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind

“Cermatori's book has the advantage of proceeding from a fact that is both readily acknowledged and traditionally undertheorized: that the quality of being ‘baroque’ still exerts tremendous conceptual thrall over the aesthetic production of modernity. Baroque Modernity is a deeply necessary and timely intervention—a genuine tour de force.”
– Adrian Daub, Stanford University
Author of Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth Century Culture

“Highly intelligent, lucid, and elegantly wrought, Baroque Modernity enlivens the history it describes and speaks to epistemological concerns. Cermatori has a good eye and ear for the languages of the stage, amply demonstrated in his discussion of baroquely modernist spectacle, a counter-Wagnerian take on total theater.”
– Spencer Golub, Brown University
Author of Heidegger and Future Presencing (The Black Pages)

“Revelatory in both local detail and overall conception, Baroque Modernity realigns theatrical modernism’s relationship to its past. It also secures its future place of importance in the renovated scholarship on modernism writ large. Four deeply researched case studies—of Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Benjamin, and Stein—anchor a broad range of expansive insights into modernism’s insufficiently acknowledged “pro-theatricality,” and Joseph Cermatori has written them in a compelling style that evokes the aesthetic qualities of the baroque itself—expressive, complex, daring, exuberant, and epiphanic.”
– Joseph Roach, Yale University
Author of Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance