The Passions of Modernism: Eliot, Yeats, Woolf, and Mann

This title offers an alternative approach to modernism as confronting helplessness and passivity. Upending the traditional view of modernism as defined by elitism, skepticism, and emotional detachment, Anthony Cuda argues that there is another view beneath this facade, one that emphasizes modernism’s deep commitment to understanding human vulnerability, powerlessness, and the unpredictable energies of passion. In
The Passions of Modernism , Cuda explores how four modernist writers - T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann - conceptualize passion, how they dramatize its upheavals and illuminations, and how it affects their ideas about the creative act. Resuscitating the classical definition of passion from the Latin passio, ‘to be moved’ or ‘to be acted on’, Cuda’s study suggests that the modernist attraction to passivity arises from a desire to gauge the limits of the active mind and to rethink psychology, aesthetics, and theories of creativity from the perspective of the moved instead of the mover. Focusing on well-known texts as well as uncollected and archival materials, Cuda sheds new light on four canonical writers by examining their work in terms of ‘passion scenes’, vivid, intense tropes situated somewhere between exhilaration and terror that recur with insistent regularity over an artist’s entire career, exerting an unusual psychological force on the creative mind that conjures them.