Deviant Modernism

This original study re-evaluates central texts of the modernist canon - Eliot's early poetry including The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past - by examining sexual energies and identifications in them that are typically regarded as perverse. According to modern cultural discourses and psychosexual categorizations, these deviant desires and identifications feminize men, or tend to render them homosexual. Colleen Lamos's analysis of the operations of gender and sexuality in these texts reveals conflicts, concerning the definition of masculine heterosexuality, which cut across the aesthetics of modernism. She argues that canonical male modernism, far from being a monolithic entity with a coherently conservative political agenda, is in fact the site of errant impulses and unresolved struggles. What emerges is a reconsideration of modernist literature as a whole, and a recognition of the heterogeneous forces which formed and deformed modernism.