Title
Minimum Writing
Document Type
Essay
Annotation
Inspired by writings by Ford Madox Hueffner (later Ford) on the artist William Hogarth and Impressionism, Rosner explores the art of omission and related characteristics in the modernist works of Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Ivy Compton-Burnett. Relates this literary minimalism, as opposed to the visual art minimalists of the 1960s and beyond, on a "rejection of excess," as noted by Ford and as practiced in post-ornamental architecture beginning in the early 1900s. Finds numerous resonances between these writers and the architecture of the likes of Le Corbusier, noting, for example, Hemingway's widely recognized "economy of expression" and his statement, "Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over."
Published in
Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life
Date
2020
Pages
35-86
Citation
Rosner, Victoria. "Minimum Writing." In Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life, 35-86. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.