Description
Book SynopsisAt the dawn of the twenty-first century, poets and architects, designers and critics, teachers and thinkers are rediscovering the virtues of the previous century's energetic cultural constellation. This book teases out the contradictions inherent in modernism's commitment to badness.
Trade Review“Bright, disquieting, and energetic, these essays bring back to life the complex political and artistic provocations of their modernisms. Badly needed.”—
Rachel Bowlby, author of
Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping“I envision
Bad Modernisms as a linchpin in the ‘new modernist studies.’ This sprightly, compelling volume gives us a map for that conversation; offers a guide to the tangled pathways of history, criticism, and cultural practice that converge in modernist studies; and reveals the astonishingly ample, indeed global, playing field of the discourse of modernism.”—
Jennifer Wicke, author of
Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social ReadingTable of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction: Modernisms Bad and New / Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz 1
Forced Exile: Walter Pater’s Queer Modernism / Heather K. Love 19
The Aftershocks of Blast: Manifestos, Satire, and the Rear-Guard of Modernism / Martin Puchner 44
Nonsense Modernism: The Limits of Modernity and the Feelings of Philosophy in Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus / Michael LeMahieu 68
The Romance of Cliche: E.M. Hull, D.H. Lawrence, and Interwar Erotic Fiction / Laura Frost 94
Virginia Woolf’s Evasion: Critical Cosmopolitanism and British Modernism / Rebecca L. Walkowitz 119
Black Venus,
Blonde Venus / Sianne Ngai 145
The Black Dandy as Bad Modernist / Monica L. Miller 179
A Shaman in Common: Lewis, Auden, and the Queerness of Liberalism / Douglas Mao 206
The Gorgeous Laughter of filipino Modernity: Carlos Bulosan’s
The Laughter of My Father / Joshua L. Miller 238
Hit-Man Modernism / Lisa Fluet 269
Cultures of Impression / Jesse Matz 298
Bibliography 331
Notes on Contributors 353
Index 355
