Amanda Reeser Lawrence’s book about the architecture of James Stirling deftly explicates the work of a master who belongs in the canon but whose place within it has not yet been found. Stirling (1926–92) was associated with the New Brutalism of the 1950s, but his turn to postmodernism in the 1970s made him difficult to categorize. In James Stirling: Revisionary Modernist, Lawrence frames her study of selected works with the question, was Stirling a modernist or a postmodernist? She argues for him being a “revisionary modernist,” maintaining that Stirling continuously revised or corrected previous modernists’ works and, eventually, even his own in what can be understood as an act comparable to rewriting.
For her interpretation, Lawrence turns to The Anxiety of Influence (1973) by Harold Bloom, whose landmark literary theory complicated the concept of influence by showing that it was a transformative process in which young, weak, ephebic poets...
University of California Press