In Search of the Lost World: The Modernist Quest for the Thing, Matter, and Body

Against the tendency to conceive modernist experimentation as defined either by subjectivity or by its eradication, Tsaiyi Wu argues for the attempt to exceed the human as itself a project of aesthetic self-cultivation. Offering exciting readings of writers from Baudelaire to Woolf, “In Search of the Lost World” makes an eloquent, distinctive contribution to important debates in literary studies.

Professor Jennifer Fleissner

Indiana University Bloomington

A champion for the obscurity and extravagance of the material world, Tsaiyi Wu however gives aesthetic values to the various mediations through which human consciousness apprehends it. Art objects, in particular, are material things that act upon us—giving voice to the “yearning toward the material world” that is a central feature of modernist art and modeling for us a spectrum of ontologies that respect the primacy of matter over mind.

Professor Jacob Emery

Indiana University Bloomington

In Wu’s many-sided study of modern art, she discovers a unified reach beyond the human skull and dives into the great lost world of true material beauty. In this book, one will be brought into a meditation on the dreams of stones, unrequited love of inorganic objects, crystallization of aesthetic sensations, and also leave challenged to see freshly how art objects recreate our relationships with the world.

Micah Tewers

Artist, filmmaker, lecturer