From performance to public sphere: The production of modernist masculinities

Abstract

Modernism criticism usaually pays more attention to performative texts and identities than to the public sphere that was a precondition of their production. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's theorization of the public sphere is used to contend that the modernist period witnessed not a decline but a transformation in public culture. It is argued that understanding turn-of-the-century literary production in terms of a transformation of the public sphere provides a better account of modernist masculinities than the criitical binaries that usually govern criticism of modernism's emergence. Three authors are discussed. The novels of George Fissing document London's changing public culture. Despite distaste for the new dissident indentities, Gissing's texts document emergent counterpublics in the 1880s and 1890s and the spaces in which they emerge. Dorothy Richardson's long anti-novel Pilgrimage goes further to represent specific material spaces like the new teashops as the stages on which a female masculinity could be performed. Finally, a reading of Kafka's short story 'The Judgement' is used to argue that despite his different location, the production of modernist masculinities in his work should also be understood in relation to the public sphere that was their material context.