Modernism And The Aesthetics Of Violence

This book addresses the subject of violence as it features in celebrated modernist works from the early twentieth century.

The notion that violence can give rise to art - and that art can serve as an agent of violence - is a dominant feature of modernist literature. In this study Paul Sheehan traces the modernist fascination with violence to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when certain French and English writers sought to celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality. Sheehan presents a panoramic view of how the aesthetics of transgression gradually mutates into an infatuation with destruction and upheaval, identifying the First World War as the event through which the modernist aesthetic of violence crystallizes. By engaging with exemplary modernists such as Joyce, Conrad, Eliot and Pound, as well as lesser-known writers including Gautier, Sacher-Masoch, Wyndham Lewis and others, Sheehan shows how artworks, so often associated with creative well-being and communicative self-expression, can be reoriented toward violent and bellicose ends.

This book addresses the subject of violence as it features in celebrated modernist works from the early twentieth century. It traces the modernist fascination with violence back to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when certain writers in France and England sought to celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality.

At the Violet Hour offers a richly historicized, trenchant look at the interlocking of literature with violence in British and Irish modernist texts.

Accounts of rape, murder, mutilation, and torture run like a bloodred thread through modernist literature in the German language. Previous accounts of German literary modernism have linked its fascination with violent destruction either to the militant avant-garde on the left or to fascist modernism on the right. Critics have noted that high modernists depicted violence through its impact on their own victimized protagonists. But by minimizing and ignoring the often disturbing attraction to aggression in the works of Franz Kafka and others, these prevalent readings have filtered out much of the provocative and productive potential of German modernism. Kai Evers’s Violent Modernists: The Aesthetics of Destruction in Twentieth-Century German Literature develops a new understanding of German modernism that moves beyond the oversimplified dichotomy of an avant-garde prone to aggression on the one hand and a modernism opposed to violence on the other. Analyzing works by Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, and others, Evers argues that these authors are among the most innovative thinkers on violence and its impact on contemporary concepts of the self, history, and society.

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles.

Offering an ambitious study of the aesthetics of violence across art, literature, film and theatre, this volume brings together traditional German aesthetic and social theory with the modern problem of violence in art. Written in an engaging style, the book includes examples ranging from Homer and Shakespeare to slasher films and performance art.

The Violence of Modernity turns to Charles Baudelaire, one of the most canonical figures of literary modernism, in order to reclaim an aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique. Works of modern literature are commonly theorized as symptomatic responses to the trauma of history. In a climate that tends to privilege crisis over critique, Debarati Sanyal argues that it is urgent to rethink literary experience in terms that recall its contestatory potential. Examining Baudelaire's poems afresh, she shifts the focus of critical attention toward an account of modernism as an active engagement with violence, specifically the violence of history in nineteenth-century France. Sanyal analyzes a literary current that uses the traditional hallmarks of modernism—irony, intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and formalism—to challenge the historical violence of modernity. Baudelaire and the committed ironists writing in his wake teach us how to read and resist the violence of history, and thereby to challenge the melancholy tenor of our contemporary "wound culture." In a series of provocative readings, Sanyal presents Baudelaire's poetry as an aesthetic form that contests historical violence through rhetorical strategies of complicity, counterviolence, and critique. The book develops a new account of Baudelaire's significance as a modernist by dislodging him both from his traditional status as a practitioner of "art for art's sake" and from his more recent incarnation as the poet of trauma. Following her extended analysis of Baudelaire's poetry, Sanyal in later chapters considers a number of authors influenced by his strategies—including Rachilde, Virginie Despentes, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre—to examine the relevance of their interventions for our current climate of trauma and terror. The result is a study that underscores how Baudelaire's legacy continues to energize literary engagements with the violence of modernity.