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 Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsyvlania

A dazzling, dialectical energy marks every page of Spirals, one of the most exciting recent syntheses of literary and art historical scholarship. Israel’s ability to trace the spiral across a truly heterogeneous, intermedial, and yet coherent sweep of twentieth- and twenty-first-century aesthetic production—from Yeats to Smithson and beyond—is exhilarating. Its procedure points to a new modernist studies.
— Martin Harries, University of California, Irvine, author of Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship

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.

Stunningly ambitious.... Israel's book opens up a number of new avenues for investigation.
— Roger Rothman

A richly suggestive. . . . examination of not just spiral images but of spiral apprehension itself.

Nico Israel is an associate professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center and Hunter College. He is the author of Outlandish: Writing Between Exile and Diaspora and has published numerous academic essays on twentieth-century literature and critical theory. He has also published widely on modern and contemporary visual art in Artforum, art exhibition catalogs, and other publications.

List of Illustrations
Introduction: On Spirals
1. Definitions: A Brief History of Spirals (and a Way of Reading Spirally)
2. Entering the Whirlpool: 'Pataphysics, Futurism, Vorticism
3. Twinned Towers: Yeats, Tatlin, and the Unfashionable Performance of Internationalism
4. L'Habite en Spirale: Duchamp, Joyce, and the Ineluctable Visibility of Entropy
Plates
5. At the End of the Jetty: Beckett . . . Smithson. Recoil . . Return
In Conclusion: The Spiral and the Grid
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index