Overview

Aldous Huxley decried ""the horrors of modern 'pleasure,'"" or the proliferation of mass produced, widely accessible entertainment that could degrade or dull the mind. He and his contemporaries, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, sought to radically redefine pleasure, constructing arduous and indirect paths to delight through their notoriously daunting work. Laura Frost follows these experiments in the art of unpleasure, connecting modernism's signature characteristics, such as irony, allusiveness, and obscurity, to an ambitious attempt to reconfigure bliss. In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic play of Joyce, Lawrence, Stein, Rhys, and others. She considers pop cultural phenomena and the rise of celebrities such as Rudolph Valentino and Gypsy Rose Lee against contemporary sociological, scientific, and philosophical writings on leisure and desire. Throughout her study, Frost incorporates recent scholarship on material and visual culture and vernacular modernism, recasting the period's high/low, elite/popular divides and formal strategies as efforts to regulate sensual and cerebral experience. Capturing the challenging tensions between these artists' commitment to innovation and the stimulating amusements they denounced yet deployed in their writing, Frost calls attention to the central role of pleasure in shaping interwar culture.

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Reviews

This book is a tour de force and will be widely and passionately read. Laura Frost has panache, acuity, incisiveness, and pleasure to burn. This is an important and shimmering book, a firework in its own right. -- Jennifer Wicke, University of Virginia

This book is a tour de force and will be widely and passionately read. Laura Frost has panache, acuity, incisiveness, and pleasure to burn. This is an important and shimmering book, a firework in its own right. -- Jennifer Wicke, University of Virginia Strikingly original both conceptually and in its readings of a diverse array of interwar authors from Joyce and Stein to Huxley and Loos, Laura Frost's revisionary study of literary modernism's relation to the pleasures of vernacular culture changes the terms of the debate concerning modernism and the great divide between high and low culture. Cannily locating modernist attitudes between the Victorian and the decadent, Frost establishes that pleasure is as rich a category for analysis as desire by bringing out modernism's ambivalent engagement with the hedonism of its time. Capturing the ambivalence's distinctive location between and beyond conventional oppositions of pleasure to pain, she juxtaposes revealingly for discussion formally experimental writers and less stylistically extravagant ones on the basis of their stances toward pleasure. Frequently focusing on embodied pleasures, from olfaction to tickling and orgasm, she establishes memorably that modernism indulged in the pleasures it ostensibly shunned. But the study's implications resonate significantly beyond modernism and the step toward postmodernism represented by Loos because modernism's legacy of ambivalence concerning pleasure is urgently relevant for understanding and assessing our contemporary response to the easy pleasures of the digital. -- John Paul Riquelme, Boston University An original and useful revision to our understanding of modernism. Publishers Weekly 5/13/13

This book is a tour de force and will be widely and passionately read. Laura Frost has panache, acuity, incisiveness, and pleasure to burn. This is an important and shimmering book, a firework in its own right. -- Jennifer Wicke, University of Virginia Strikingly original both conceptually and in its readings of a diverse array of interwar authors from Joyce and Stein to Huxley and Loos, Laura Frost's revisionary study of literary modernism's relation to the pleasures of vernacular culture changes the terms of the debate concerning modernism and the great divide between high and low culture. Cannily locating modernist attitudes between the Victorian and the decadent, Frost establishes that pleasure is as rich a category for analysis as desire by bringing out modernism's ambivalent engagement with the hedonism of its time. Capturing the ambivalence's distinctive location between and beyond conventional oppositions of pleasure to pain, she juxtaposes revealingly for discussion formally experimental writers and less stylistically extravagant ones on the basis of their stances toward pleasure. Frequently focusing on embodied pleasures, from olfaction to tickling and orgasm, she establishes memorably that modernism indulged in the pleasures it ostensibly shunned. But the study's implications resonate significantly beyond modernism and the step toward postmodernism represented by Loos because modernism's legacy of ambivalence concerning pleasure is urgently relevant for understanding and assessing our contemporary response to the easy pleasures of the digital. -- John Paul Riquelme, Boston University

Author Information

Laura Frost is a writer and scholar. Her work on sex, art, gender, literature, and film has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Bookforum, The Times Higher Education, Quartz, and elsewhere. She is also the author of Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism.

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