Wyndham Lewis’s Universalism : The ‘Vortex’ and the ‘Village’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian-born British artist Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) was a co-founder of Vorticism (1914–1915), the only avant-garde art movement in England at the beginning of the 20th century, whose geometric designs and innovative conceptions shared major modernist tendencies typical of modernist projects. Modern England did not have avant-garde art movements that extended to large-scale urban planning and modern architecture, such as Cubism, Futurism, and De Stijl, as in other European countries; therefore, Lewis’s tendencies at this time may be regarded as ‘continental’. Interestingly, however, according to art historian Paul Edwards, Lewis’s The Caliph’s Design (1919) shows ‘the aborted beginning of international Modernism in London’ (Edwards 1986: 150). Indeed, the polarisation of his career evokes an orientation towards cultural community, as if it were a ‘universalism’, while revealing his innermost picture of the conflict between England and continental Europe. With this background of Wyndham Lewis in mind, we will focus on three points in this paper. First, using the design of the Vorticist journal Blast, we will examine the concept of a ‘vortex’. In Blast, Lewis and the Vorticists attempted to examine the human consciousness emerging in the new city through innovative design, and critique the environment in contemporary society. Second, we will analyse how this abstract concept is developed through The Caliph’s Design. Third, we will consider Lewis’s idea of cultural community, considering that the ‘village’ has received significant attention in Wyndham Lewis’s political pamphlet, Anglosaxony. This concept subsequently influenced leading communication theorist Marshall McLuhan’s (1911–1980) idea of the ‘global village’.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".