Description
Book SynopsisA fascinating study of how behavioral science shaped twentieth-century politics and the modernist literary period. The advent of the twentieth century famously brought about new personal and political freedoms, including radical changes in voting rights and expressions of gender and sexuality. Yet writers and cultural critics shared a sense that modern life reduced citizens to automatons capable of interacting with the world in only the most reflexive ways. In Automatic, Timothy Wientzen asks why modernists were deeply anxious about the role of reflexive behaviorsand the susceptibility of bodies to physical stimuliin the new political structures of the twentieth century. Engaging with historical thinking about human behaviors that fundamentally changed the nature of political and literary practice, Wientzen demonstrates the ways in which a politics of reflex came to shape the intellectual and cultural life of the modernist era. Documenting some of the ways that modernist writers and
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Prescribed Tracks
1. Prescribed Tracks: Modernism, Modernity, and the Human Automaton
2. Vibrant Bodies, Automatic Minds: Vitalism, D. H. Lawrence, and the Politics of Spontaneity
3. Public Reflex: Wyndham Lewis, Public Relations, and the Invisible Government
4. Pavlovian Nationalism: Rebecca West's Reflex Communities
5. Higher Degrees of Automaticity: Habitus, Samuel Beckett, and Late Modernism
Afterword: Choice Architects, Where Is Your Vortex? The Politics of Reflex in the Twenty-First Century
Works Cited
Notes
Index
