Embodied Modernism

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic provides unsettling context for reading Peter Fifield’s Modernism and Physical Illness and Michael Davidson’s Invalid Modernism. Fifield’s study asks us to think about how it feels to be sick, what it means to observe sickness in others, and how illness shifts relations of care. Davidson’s book shows us how disability and chronic illness make us vulnerable not only to the conditions themselves but to dismissal and disavowal and to biopolitical control. Both books focus on literary dealings with bodies, but such dealings of course reflect eugenically-inflected conceptualizations of health and wellness, disability and bodily norms, fragmentation and wholeness, that circulated in the modernist period and linger in our own. These conceptualizations and norms are explored in depth by Davidson as he considers the ways modernist literature and aesthetics are entangled with bodies in general and disability in particular. This effort leads Davidson to engage not only with disability studies but also with the aesthetic turn in recent literary studies, with affect theory, queer theory, and postcolonial and critical race studies. His book is incredibly wide ranging, treating literature from a long modernist period that encompasses Oscar Wilde and Henry James, avant-garde movements such as futurism and Dada, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, and Samuel Beckett, and contemporary global experimental literature and video by writers and thinkers such as Indra Sinha, M. NourbeSe Philip, Rachel Zolf, and Mel Baggs. Davidson also explores visual art and opera, theories of degeneration, and histories of eugenics. And he modernism / modernity