Modernism is hot again. At the dawn of the twenty-first century,
poets and architects, designers and critics, teachers and artists
are rediscovering the virtues of the previous century's most
vibrant cultural constellation. Yet this widespread embrace raises
questions about modernism's relation to its own success.
Modernism's "badness"-its emphasis on outrageous behavior, 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 status as a
subversive aesthetic intervention seems undermined. The
contributors to Bad Modernisms tease out the contradictions in
modernism's commitment to badness.Bad Modernisms thus builds on and
extends the "new modernist studies," recent work marked by the
application of diverse methods and attention to texts and artists
not usually labeled as modernist. In this collection, these
developments are exemplified by essays ranging from a reading of
dandyism in 1920s Harlem as a performance of a "bad" black
modernist imaginary to a consideration of Filipino American
modernism in the context of anticolonialism. The contributors
reconsider familiar figures-such as Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence,
Josef 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 artifacts ranging from novels to
manifestos, from philosophical treatises to movie musicals, and
from anthropological essays to advertising campaigns, these essays
signal the capaciousness and energy galvanizing the new modernist
studies. Contributors. Lisa Fluet, Laura Frost, Michael LeMahieu,
Heather K. Love, Douglas Mao, Jesse Matz, Joshua L. Miller, Monica
L. Miller, Sianne Ngai, Martin Puchner, Rebecca L. Walkowitz
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