Black Girls and Lady Police

In this epilogue, Robin Hackett begins to theorize the future of the affective ecology of the modernist body as a raced body. Hackett’s essay reaches into the realm of twenty-first-century social justice advocacy in the current political climate—a climate in which the supremacy of white bodies and segregation of black bodies are constituted by spaces of access and exclusion—to ask of the modernist body, what’s next? Drawing on a framework of emotions that have been mobilized for critical activism, love, rage, and shame, and reading the spaces of schools and restrooms, care homes and gyms, Hackett questions the logic of how public affects circulate between black and white bodies and suggests instead that a blank affect may produce an ethical response that truly matters despite how it may make us feel.

Frustrated Energies in Modernism’s Female Arrangements

Judith Paltin entertains a gendered body that necessarily both succeeds and fails in bodying, creating a non-futurity. For women and racial minorities, modes of bodily recognition (or “arrangements,” as Paltin terms them) have been typically seen as frustrated searches for identity that delimit such figures’ abilities for political and agential change. Yet Paltin turns this notion on its head. Examining works including Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando for what she calls frustrated affective energies—the mass of feelings that arise from literary encounters with such limited arrangements—Paltin finds that such frustrations actually may offer divergent assemblies, assemblies of bodies that “accommodate their unknown, emergent capacities.”

“Things were in people, people were in things”

Kim Sigouin’s treatment of H.D.’s manifesto and film writings brings out that author’s exploration of the body’s entanglement with nonhuman processes. For H.D., Sigouin argues, the body becomes a lens for translating the world, and therefore a new way of seeing the world, a way of seeing she sought to expressing in her own writing—a vehicle for this new ecological affective language of the body.

Into the Ether

In this introduction, the editors set out the state of current scholarship in affect studies and ecocriticism, as well as historicize the body in the twentieth century. The editors argue for a renewed examination of the body in modernist literature as a mode of transforming such scholarship. Presenting a rereading of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as example of what innovated approaches may do, the introduction demonstrates the types of inquiries into the modernist body that the collection’s chapters will engage, using both ecocriticism’s body as fleshly, material site and affect’s body as processual “becoming.”

“Becoming Animal, Becoming Other”

Kathryn Van Wert’s chapter entertains modernism’s experiments with depersonalization, looking to Rainer Maria Rilke and J. M. Coetzee in conversation with political theorist Jean Comaroff to address the body as living “with an open wound” at the height of colonial empire and within post-apartheid discourse. In these wounded modernist bodies, she argues, we may find an emergent material-affective response to the failed ethics of a juridico-political rhetoric dependent on a closed model of mind and body. Van Wert concludes by theorizing an ecological body politic whose openness—affectively and materially—must accept risk and contingency in order to gain vitality within modernity.

Flesh over Granite

Karen Guendel locates in William Carlos Williams’s poetry a slippage between body and text, catalyzed by the poem’s aesthetic preference for stone over flesh. Such poetry, Guendel’s essay suggests, is bound up in textual erotics wherein the text and reader perform a bodily encounter that gives life to one and pleasure to the other. Such material poetics foreground an embodiment of human life in environmental terms, through its material residues—in the reader’s lips, the book itself, and the stone memorial objects that clutter museum halls.

“‘I’m not sick,’ I said. ‘I’m wounded’”

Cheryl Hindrichs examines the ways in which the wartime novels of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway offer modes of being outside masculinity for wounded male soldiers within the medical-military spaces of the war—from the army hospital to the pastoral sites of recovery. Yet Hindrichs finds, although these sites resist destructive modes of masculinity—violence, capitalism, empire—this resistance ultimately fails. The wounded male body is reinscribed as body of illness within a hierarchy that seeks to dominate it rather than free it from discourses of power.

E. M. Forster among the Ruins

Stuart Christie argues that E. M. Forster’s conative bodies—constituted by their material alliance with other bodies, in this case his Egyptian lover el’Adl, and the North African natural and built environs which surround them—make possible a new ethics of contact within the British Empire. Mixing material and textual encounters allows Forster to begin to re-make the colonizer-colonized relationship, demonstrating human imbrication in landscapes native and foreign, as well as the way in which bodies function as both barriers and bridges to the readability of othered spaces.

The Brain and the Living World in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water

Mary Wood examines New Zealander Janet Frame’s representations of the human brain as “mysterious entity” on the borders of humanness in Faces in the Water. Wood argues Frame resists existing medical narratives of the brain which sought to know, in inherently ethnocentric ways, human insides only by their material shell—the skull. The feminized postcolonial body of Frame’s character is, Wood concludes, paradoxically threatened by the reduction of her mind to dead matter, as well as able to find new agency by associating her self across fleshly boundaries, finding the seat of her identity to be co-located in the surrounding landscape of her decolonized environment.

“I wanna be your puppy”

Taking up queer reconfigurations of the modernist body, Anna Christine addresses Djuna Barnes’s unusual array of bodies in Nightwood—bodies that cross boundaries of human and animal, objects and subjects, male and female. Christine finds these bodies are uniquely able to coerce readers through the unassuming, yet edged “cuteness” of these queer bodies, subsuming typical responses of disgust or disorientation. The “cute,” queer erotic encounter then becomes means to open hopeful space for a non-heteronormative sexual futurity, a futurity that does not move forward laterally but goes down—and on all fours