The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents

Description

Aldous Huxley decried "the horrors of modern 'pleasure,' " or the proliferation of mass produced, widely accessible entertainment that could degrade or dull the mind. He and his contemporaries, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, sought to radically redefine pleasure, constructing arduous and indirect paths to delight through their notoriously daunting works. Laura Frost follows these experiments in the art of unpleasure, connecting modernism's signature characteristics—such as irony, allusiveness, and obscurity—to an ambitious attempt to reconfigure bliss. Throughout, she recasts the period's high/low, elite/popular divides and formal strategies as efforts to regulate sensual and cerebral experience. Capturing the challenging tensions between these artists' commitment to innovation and the stimulating amusements they denounced yet deployed in their writing, Frost calls attention to the central role of pleasure in shaping interwar culture. A revealing study of the sensual tensions powering the period’s formal and ideological innovations.