‘Do the Senses Make Sense?’: An Introduction

Bouchet, Marie; Loison-Charles, Julie; Poulin, Isabelle

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_1

Cited by 12 publications

References 1 publication

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Troubling Late Modernism

Battersby

2022

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Troubling Late Modernism: Ethics, Feeling, and the Novel Form charts how modernist techniques for depicting characters’ thoughts, feelings, and desires have been perversely reinvented by some of the most influential and innovative writers of the postwar period. Chapters on Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, John Banville, J. M. Coetzee, and Eimear McBride reveal how these writers at once extend and exploit modernist forms of narration to cultivate disquieting affective attachments between readers and protagonists compelled by violent or exploitative sexual desires. By interrogating the expressive power and ethical liabilities of modes of writing that give us intimate access to characters’ inner lives, late modernism poses fundamental philosophical questions about emotion and its inextricability from knowledge and ethical deliberation. Whilst other historians of the novel have characterized late modernism’s formal innovations as ethically and politically edifying, Troubling Late Modernism highlights their more disquieting potential for lending sympathy and profundity to sentiments deemed inadmissible in our everyday lives. Charting late modernism’s characteristic fusion of aesthetic difficulty and emotional and ethical provocation demands an approach attuned to the experience of reading these disturbingly erotic narratives. In dialogue with recent debates about critical method, Troubling Late Modernism presents a new way of closely reading prose fiction that brings together the lessons of formalism and affect theory.

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