Abstraction occupies a privileged position within the historiography of Modernist art.  Long associated with rupture, criticality, and teleology, abstraction is also a vexed term, often only precariously opposed to such concepts as representation, narrative, analogy, and denotation.  This graduate seminar offers an expanded and contrapuntal account of abstraction, revisiting the European avant-garde's interdependence with non-Western art and "minor" arts, and exploring its afterlives, perversities, and blind spots. Topics also include abstraction's cartographies and relation to political theory; formalism and surface; materiality and metaphor.