The Modernist Body

Skyscrapers, factories, jazz clubs, crowded arcades: as the landscape of modernity took shape, the body was conscripted into new relationships with its physical surroundings. Yet few modernists agreed on what bodies, in all their diverse manifestations, had come to signify in modernity. “I feel the matter of my heart being transformed, metallized, in an optimism of steel,” declared the Futurist theorist F.T. Marinetti, celebrating the body’s fusion with machines; in a contrasting vision, novelist Djuna Barnes whimsically described the lesbian body as hatching, fully formed, from an egg laid by angels. In this seminar—which ranges across film, poetry, drama, fiction, the essay, and visual art—we will examine these contradictions as we explore how the body was refashioned in the arts and culture of modernism. In works by Fritz Lang, Nella Larsen, Franz Kafka, Radclyffe Hall, Claude McKay, Virginia Woolf, and others, new and startling representations of embodiment come into focus. Which functions did the body accrue in its ambit through the modern metropolis, and which conceptual trajectories did it limn? With these questions in view, we will develop a critical account of the politics and aesthetics of modernist embodiment. Topics we will consider include labor, technology, and robots; race and racialization; masking and passing; fashion; queer desiring bodies; disabled bodies and disease; sport and war; and cyborgs. We will also probe the limits of the “human” body in relation to animals and artificial life. At the end of the term, students will have an opportunity to present an embodied response to our course texts by critically restaging a literary scene.