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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