Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Douglas Mao is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production.

Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation and a coeditor of several books, including The Turn to Ethics.

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"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 Reading"

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BAD MODERNISMS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................................viiDouglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz - Introduction: Modernisms Bad and New..................................................................1Heather K. Love - Forced Exile: Walter Pater's Queer Modernism................................................................................19Martin Puchner - The Aftershocks of Blast: Manifestos, Satire, and the Rear-Guard of Modernism................................................44Michael LeMahieu - Nonsense Modernism: The Limits of Modernity and the Feelings of Philosophy in Wittgenstein's Tractatus.....................68Laura Frost - The Romance of Clichi: E. M. Hull, D. H. Lawrence, and Interwar Erotic Fiction..................................................94Rebecca L. Walkowitz - Virginia Woolf's Evasion: Critical Cosmopolitanism and British Modernism...............................................119Sianne Ngai - Black Venus, Blonde Venus.......................................................................................................145Monica L. Miller - The Black Dandy as Bad Modernist...........................................................................................179Douglas Mao - A Shaman in Common: Lewis, Auden, and the Queerness of Liberalism...............................................................206Joshua L. Miller - The Gorgeous Laughter of Filipino Modernity: Carlos Bulosan's The Laughter of My Father....................................238Lisa Fluet - Hit-Man Modernism................................................................................................................269Jesse Matz - Cultures of Impression...........................................................................................................298Bibliography..................................................................................................................................331Notes on Contributors.........................................................................................................................353Index.........................................................................................................................................355

Chapter One

to be weak is miserable, Doing or suffering ... Paradise Lost (1.157-58)

In thinking about bad modernism, it may be useful to recall that it was modernism itself that gave bad a good name. Being bad has always meant crossing the line, turning away from what is accepted and familiar, heading out for the unknown; but it was only with modernism that the value of such transgression underwent a sharp reversal. Certainly, we may say that the Romantics inaugurated the possibility that bad could be good, that revolt could be a moral duty rather than a moral failing. But it was modernism that gave currency to the idea that going to the limits might be essential to the recreation of the world. From Baudelaire's Satanism to Marx's "poetry of the future" to Nietzsche's "transvaluation of all values," modernists sought to wreck the old world in order to make room for the new. They viewed the world of their predecessors as so corrupt and oppressive that it practically begged for destruction; they prescribed, in the words of D. H. Lawrence, "surgery-or a bomb." Although it made up only a fraction of the aesthetic production in the period, this "heroic" version of modernism has been most consistently identified with modernism itself. The academy has welcomed many of modernism's most notorious bombsquads, making a place not only for the Men of 1914, but also for Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists. Over the course of the twentieth century, this version of modernism has prevailed to such an extent that innovation and the break with authority now look like core values.

It is a mark of modernism's profound success, in other words, that "we moderns" tend to think that making good depends on a willingness to do bad. As a result, it is difficult to say what we might mean by bad modernism. If we are considering making a break with the orthodoxies of modernism, resistance may be futile: iconoclasm is what modernism is all about. If we hope, instead, to identify and claim a subaltern current or deviant strain of modernism, we are once again in trouble. Such modernism would not really be bad modernism: it would just be modernism. Again, we might interpret bad modernism as a dissident form of modernist scholarship; however, in an academic context that values transgression or, at the very least, novelty, modernism that is not a little bit bad does not get much play. Given the modernist transvaluation of values, it is difficult to imagine a bad modernism that would not seem anything but just fine.

In his book on the modernist work of art, Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Albright characterizes modernism as an art of extremity. He writes, "Much of the strangeness, the stridency, the exhilaration of Modernist art can be explained by [its] strong thrust toward the verges of aesthetic experience: after certain nineteenth-century artists had established a remarkably safe, intimate center where the artist and audience could dwell, the twentieth century reaches out to the freakish circumference of art." Albright describes the extremist impulse in modernism as a desire to cross boundaries, to set off from the center of culture toward its outer limits. What is crucial in such a definition, however, is the different valence of exile for those escaping from the center and for those who find themselves already positioned on the "freakish circumference." The meaning of modernist transgression-of crossing the line-depends to a great extent on which way you are headed: it is one thing to light out for the Territory, and something different, after all, to live there.

Recently, critics have begun to rethink this image of modernism as a "drive to the margins" by situating aesthetic modernism within a broader geographical and cultural framework. The ascendancy of American and European high modernism has been challenged by recent work that explores black and white modernism, non-elite cultural production in the period, the gender of modernism, and the global dimensions of modernity. While it is possible to understand the transgressive aspect of modernism as an escape from the crumbling center of culture (the "white flight" model), the early twentieth century was also an era of new social possibilities for a range of marginal or dominated subjects. If the prevailing image of modernism remains the drive to the margins, it is in part because modernism itself is still defined from the center; recent work on alternative cultures of modernity has not been integrated into an understanding of the period as marked by traffic between the center and the margins. The exemplary modernist gesture of self-exile is at some distance from the experience of "forced exile"-whether through migration or marginalization-which is one of the most widespread and characteristic effects of modernization. If one has not departed under one's own steam, being on the margins looks less like heroic sacrifice and more like amor fati. Such a modernism cannot easily be recuperated as good: in recording the experience of forced exile, it undermines the heroism of modernist transgression, revealing the uneven...