Deviant modernism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T.S.Eliot, James Joyce and Marcel Proust (1999) - Colleen Lamos
Review "This is a controversial study recommended for upper-division undergraduates through faculty." Choice "Yet Deviant Modernism is valuable as a study of that very will to normativity which structures the conventional moral and artistic codes of these three high male modernists, deconstructing the authority os such codes by revealing their defensiveness, circular logic, and disavowed irrationality." James Joyce Literary Supplement "Deviant Modernism is extremely well researched and beautifully written." Modern Philology "...[Lamo's study of modernism] makes such intellectual labor all the more pressing and valuable." --via Amazon.com
Book Description This original study reevaluates central texts of the modernist canon--Eliot's early poetry including The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past--by examining sexual energies and identifications in them that are typically regarded as perverse. Colleen Lamos' analysis of the operations of gender and sexuality in these texts reveals conflicts, concerning the definition of masculine heterosexuality, which cut across the aesthetics of modernism. What emerges is a reconsideration of modernist literature as a whole, gender categories, and the relation between errant sexuality and literary "mistakes."--via Amazon.com
See also: deviant - modernism - James Joyce - Marcel Proust - T.S. Eliot Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (2002) - Laura Catherine Frost
Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (2002) - Laura Catherine Frost [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Jung hardly went far enough when he said: "Hitler is the unconscious of every German"; he comes uncomfortably near to being the unconscious of most of us. --W. H. Auden
First Sentence: Sexualized images of fascism are commonly assumed to be the creation of postwar and postmodern culture: How could anyone who had lived through fascism have such a mistaken understanding of it?
In her genuinely thought-provoking study Laura Frost chooses to examine Modernist writers who failed to succumb to fascist ideology, yet produced "fictions of eroticized fascism." The study is provocative and daring in the sense that there is an almost sheerly thematic link between the chosen authors, apart from the fact that they have all been described as belonging to literary Modernism (some cases are evident in this respect and some are slightly debatable). The "pannational project" places authors such as D. H. Lawrence, Georges Bataille, Hans Bellmer, Vercors (Jean Bruller), Jean Genet, Isherwood, Katherine Burdekin, Woolf, Duras and Plath under one rubric. The author postulates a line of continuity among these authors, which assumption is not always easily tenable, but the book reads coherently as well as thoroughgoing. --http://www.womenwriters.net/winter2003/Sex_Drives.htm [Jun 2006]
Salvador Dalì's autobiography confesses that "Hitler turned me on in the highest," while Sylvia Plath maintains that "every woman adores a Fascist." Susan Sontag's famous observation that art reveals the seamier side of fascism in bondage, discipline, and sexual deviance would certainly appear to be true in modernist and postwar literary texts. How do we account for eroticized representations of fascism in anti-fascist literature, for sexual desire that escapes the bounds of politics?
Laura Frost advances a compelling reading of works by D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, and Sylvia Plath, paying special attention to undercurrents of enthrallment with tyrants, uniforms, and domination. She argues that the first generation of writers raised within psychoanalytic discourse found in fascism the libidinal unconscious through which to fantasize acts--including sadomasochism and homosexuality--not permitted in a democratic conception of sexuality without power relations. By delineating democracy's investment in a sexually transgressive fascism, an investment that persists to this day, Frost demonstrates how politics enters into fantasy. This provocative and closely-argued book offers both a fresh contribution to modernist literature and a theorization of fantasy. --http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=3715 [Jun 2006]
TOC:
* Introduction “Fascinating Fascism”
* Fascism and Sadomasochism: The Origins of an Erotics
* The Libidinal Politics of D. H. Lawrence’s “Leadership Novels”
* The Surreal Swastikas of Georges Bataille and Hans Bellmer
* “Every woman adores a Fascist”: Marguerite Duras, Sylvia Plath, and Feminist Visions of Fascism
* Beauty and the Boche: Propaganda and the Sexualized Enemy in Vercors’s Silence of the Sea
* Horizontal Treason: Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites
Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1996) - David Weir
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Deviant modernism" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
