Bad Modernisms

Modernism is hot again. At 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 most energetic cultural constellation. Yet this widespread embrace raises questions about modernism's relation to its own success. Modernism's "badness"--its emphasis on outrageous behaviour, its elevation of negativity, its refusal to be condoned--seems essential to its power. But once modernism is accepted as "good" or valuable (as a great deal of modernist art now is), its claim to be a revolutionary aesthetic intervention seems undermined. The contributors to Bad Modernisms tease out the contradictions inherent in modernism's commitment to badness. In so doing, Bad Modernisms builds on and extends the "new modernist studies," recent work marked by a commitment to diverse methods and attention to texts and artists not traditionally placed under the modernist heading. In this collection, these developments are exemplified in essays ranging from a comparative reading of European and African American dandyisms to a consideration of Filipino-American modernism in the context of anti-colonialism. The contributors reconsider familiar figures - such as Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph von Sternberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W. H. Auden, and Wyndham Lewis - and bring to light the work of lesser-known artists, including the writer Carlos Bulosan and the experimental filmmaker Len Lye. Examining cultural artefacts ranging from novels to manifestoes, from philosophical treatises to movie musicals, and from anthropological essays to advertising campaigns, they signal the capaciousness and energy galvanizing the new modernist studies.