Bad Modernisms

Description

Modernism is hot again. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, poets and architects, designers and critics, teachers and artists are rediscovering the virtues of the previous century’s most vibrant cultural constellation. Yet this widespread embrace raises questions about modernism’s relation to its own success. Modernism’s “badness”—its emphasis on outrageous behavior, its elevation of negativity, its refusal to be condoned—seems essential to its power. But once modernism is accepted as “good” or valuable (as a great deal of modernist art now is), its status as a subversive aesthetic intervention seems undermined. The contributors to Bad Modernisms tease out the contradictions in modernism’s commitment to badness. Bad Modernisms thus builds on and extends the “new modernist studies,” recent work marked by the application of diverse methods and attention to texts and artists not usually labeled as modernist. In this collection, these developments are exemplified by essays ranging from a reading of dandyism in 1920s Harlem as a performance of a “bad” black modernist imaginary to a consideration of Filipino American modernism in the context of anticolonialism. The contributors reconsider familiar figures—such as Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Josef von Sternberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W. H. Auden, and Wyndham Lewis—and bring to light the work of lesser-known artists, including the writer Carlos Bulosan and the experimental filmmaker Len Lye. Examining cultural artifacts ranging from novels to manifestos, from philosophical treatises to movie musicals, and from anthropological essays to advertising campaigns, these essays signal the capaciousness and energy galvanizing the new modernist studies. Contributors. Lisa Fluet, Laura Frost, Michael LeMahieu, Heather K. Love, Douglas Mao, Jesse Matz, Joshua L. Miller, Monica L. Miller, Sianne Ngai, Martin Puchner, Rebecca L. Walkowitz Contents Acknowledgments Douglas Mao and Rebecca L.Walkowitz -Introduction: Modernisms Bad and New Heather K. Love - Forced Exile: Walter Pater’s Queer Modernism Martin Puchner - The Aftershocks of Blast: Manifestos, Satire, and the Rear-Guard of Modernism Michael LeMahieu - Nonsense Modernism: The Limits of Modernity and the Feelings of Philosophy in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Laura Frost - The Romance of Cliché: E. M. Hull, D. H. Lawrence, and Interwar Erotic Fiction Rebecca L.Walkowitz - Virginia Woolf ’s Evasion: Critical Cosmopolitanism and British Modernism Sianne Ngai - Black Venus, Blonde Venus Monica L. Miller - The Black Dandy as Bad Modernist Douglas Mao - A Shaman in Common: Lewis, Auden, and the Queerness of Liberalism Joshua L. Miller - The Gorgeous Laughter of Filipino Modernity:Carlos Bulosan’s The Laughter of My Father Lisa Fluet - Hit-Man Modernism Jesse Matz - Cultures of Impression Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index