wall lights & sconces
the passions of modernism eliot yeats woolf and mann
upending the traditional view of modernism as defined by skepticism and emotional detachment anthony cuda argues for a perspective that emphasizes instead its deep commitment to understanding human vulnerability powerlessness and the unpredictable energies of passion . in the passions of modernism cuda explores how four modernist writersa a at . s. eliot w. b. yeats virginia woolf and thomas manna a aconceptualize passion how they dramatize its upheavals and illuminations and how it affects their ideas about the creative act . br p cuda argues that many literary scholars have not allowed modernism to get far enough out of control . in this work he seeks to demonstrate that it was from its inception an expression of the desire to relinquish the very control that its critics mistakenly attribute to it . to this end cuda examines how several representative writers confront helplessness and passivity in their work and what this confrontation means for their conceptions of creativity consciousness and the life of emotions . the modernist artistic process cuda suggests is a register of the minda a a s encounter with forces beyond its control . br p resuscitating the classical definition of passion from the latin passio a a ato be moveda a a or a a ato be acted on a a a cudaa a a s study indicates that the modernist attraction to passivity arises from a desire to gauge the limits of the active mind and to rethink psychology and aesthetics from the perspective of the moved instead of the mover . focusing on well known texts as well as uncollected and archival materialsa a asuch as yeatsa a a s letters and eliota a a s prosea a acuda sheds new light on four canonical writers by examining their work in terms of a a apassion scenes a a a vivid intense tropes situated somewhere between exhilaration and terror that recur with insistent regularity over an artista a a s entire career exerting an unusual psychological force on the creative mind that conjures them . cuda also offers a corrective to debates about contemporary poetry and postmodernism by showing how criticism continues to rely upon misconceptions about affect and impersonality in modernism .