Modernism and Affect

Abstract

This book contains eleven original multi-disciplinary chapters – and one chapter-length introduction – that explore the affective dimensions of modernism. Modernism has often been characterized by its blunt opposition to both the kitsch sentimentality of mass culture and the expressive emotionality of Romanticism, and so its relationship to affective matters has historically been underexplored. The chapters in this book reconsider the complexity of modernist attitudes towards feeling in the light of theory’s turn to matters of embodiment, materiality, and affect. However, Modernism and Affect does not rely on a homogeneous theory of affect, but rather explores modernist feeling from a variety of theoretical and historical positions. While some chapters consider modernist texts alongside theorists associated with the recent upsurge of interest in affect, such as Brian Massumi, Giles Deleuze, and Sianne Ngai, others engage with longer histories of emotion, and find a wide range of models helpful in rethinking modernist feeling, including psychoanalysis, phenomenology, critical theory, and even the deconstructive linguistic philosophy with which the ‘affective turn’ has been opposed. Similarly, the chapters collectively understand ‘modernism’ in capacious terms, tracing the movement from its origins in the post-war period to its afterlives in the postwar period. The range of cultural products considered spans from the canonical to the marginal, and includes literature, architecture, philosophy, dance, visual art, and design.