The Problem with Pleasure
Modernism and Its Discontents
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- $28.99
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
Aldous Huxley decried "the horrors of modern 'pleasure,'" or the proliferation of mass produced, widely accessible entertainment that could degrade or dull the mind. He and his contemporaries, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, sought to radically redefine pleasure, constructing arduous and indirect paths to delight through their notoriously daunting work. Laura Frost follows these experiments in the art of unpleasure, connecting modernism's signature characteristics, such as irony, allusiveness, and obscurity, to an ambitious attempt to reconfigure bliss.
In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic play of Joyce, Lawrence, Stein, Rhys, and others. She considers pop cultural phenomena and the rise of celebrities such as Rudolph Valentino and Gypsy Rose Lee against contemporary sociological, scientific, and philosophical writings on leisure and desire.
Throughout her study, Frost incorporates recent scholarship on material and visual culture and vernacular modernism, recasting the period's high/low, elite/popular divides and formal strategies as efforts to regulate sensual and cerebral experience. Capturing the challenging tensions between these artists' commitment to innovation and the stimulating amusements they denounced yet deployed in their writing, Frost calls attention to the central role of pleasure in shaping interwar culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As most English majors would admit, reading modernist poetry or novels is often a difficult experience. But as New School literature professor Frost (Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism) details in this accessible volume, the difficulty is part of the point. Frost argues that suspicion of the seductions of mass entertainment led many modernists to subvert easy enjoyment in favor of "unpleasure." Somewhere between pleasure and pain, unpleasure is the product of bewilderment, frustration, and strenuous cognitive work cultivated through textual experimentation, riddlelike constructions, or a repudiation of popular forms. Among the highlights in Frost's analysis of modernist bliss are a discussion of scent in Ulysses, the use of "tickling" as a model for understanding Gertrude Stein's textual effects, as well as the "orgasmic discipline" of D.H. Lawrence that veers between novel and familiar pleasures. Frost also investigates the class origins and gendering of pleasure in Patrick Hamilton and Jean Rhys, and the synthesis of popular pleasure and highbrow language games in the work of Anita Loos. Loos, finally, offers Frost a bridge between the modern and the postmodern, which she addresses in a coda on David Foster Wallace's ambivalence toward the ubiquity of pleasurable content in contemporary media. While aimed at academic audiences and undeniably trendy in its exploration of affect, this is an original and useful revision to our understanding of modernism.
