Vertiginous Aspiration

This chapter shows how the aesthetics of vertiginous aspiration and ironic transcendence became central for European writers who have come to be recognized as canonical modernists. It focuses in particular on Guillaume Apollinaire’s visions of “turning towers” in “Zone” and other poems dealing with Parisian modernity and cosmopolitanism; Franz Kafka’s “irony of transcendence” in various short stories and personal writings; Virginia Woolf’s “views from below” in novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse to essays like “On Being Ill” and “The Leaning Tower”; and images of urban space, post-Christian philosophy, and the aesthetics and politics of sovereignty in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.