The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents

by Laura Frost

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.

Genres: Literary Criticism

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 18, 2013

About the author

Laura Catherine Frost is Chair of Liberal Studies, Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the Eugene Lang College of The New School for Liberal Arts.

Reviews

[Mattjmjmjm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a good book for the most part, the introduction goes into the long discussion on which pleasures are more valuable, starting with the greeks thinking the pleasures of the mind are more valuable than that of the sensual. It makes sense that intellectuals would feel that way, sort of plays into the high and low brow type of thing. The modernist thinkers and writers had this fear of mindless pleasure due to the rise of radio, cinema, and popular novels, the pleasure that was too accessible and immediate, that required little effort in thought. I still feel like this attitude exists, "why are you watching Marvel films, they are so mindless" or something like that. That a work of art that is more complex and hard to understand must be better, I think that is quite silly. Each work of art serves a function for its audience, most works of art have a valid place I assume. Certain readers seem to gravitate towards complex and hard-to-read novels, big post-modern books. I sometimes think over the types of pleasure I go for, maybe going for a lot of intellectual pleasure I am missing out on my mindless fun type of stuff. This book is getting me to rethink how I see pleasure mostly when it comes to books but also in general.