Awkward Moments: Melodrama, Modernism, and the Politics of Affect
The modernist privileging of irony and detached contemplation frequently combined with a recognition of the social and artistic significance of affect. The relation between melodramatic structures of feeling and modernist innovation is evident in two plays of the interwar years: Bertolt Brecht and E...
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| Veröffentlicht in: | PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 2013-03, Vol.128 (2), p.337-352 |
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| creator | KOHLMANN, BENJAMIN |
| description | The modernist privileging of irony and detached contemplation frequently combined with a recognition of the social and artistic significance of affect. The relation between melodramatic structures of feeling and modernist innovation is evident in two plays of the interwar years: Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann's Happy End and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood's On the Frontier. Scholars need to develop a vocabulary that complements the customary critical emphasis on modernist "irony," "estrangement," and "difficulty" and that can be used to reconstruct the full force of the modernist uses of affect. Instead of estranging melodrama to make it palatable to an audience trained in high modernism, the negotiations between sentimentality and avant-garde aesthetics in Happy End and On the Frontier trigger a backward dialectical movement in which the modernist rallying call to "make it new" blurs into the established patterns of melodrama. |
| doi_str_mv | 10.1632/pmla.2013.128.2.337 |
| format | Article |
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| ispartof | PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2013-03, Vol.128 (2), p.337-352 |
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| language | eng |
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| source | JSTOR Archive Collection A-Z Listing; EZB-FREE-00999 freely available EZB journals; Cambridge University Press Journals Complete |
| subjects | Aesthetics American literature Auden, W H (1907-1973) Brecht, Bertolt (1898-1956) British & Irish literature Drama English literature Epic dramas German literature Happiness Hauptmann, Elisabeth Irony Isherwood, Christopher (1904-1986) Literary criticism Love Melodrama Modern literature Modernism Modernist art Movies Negotiation Politics Theater Theater criticism Theater studies |
| title | Awkward Moments: Melodrama, Modernism, and the Politics of Affect |
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