The Shropshire Schizoid and the Machines of Modernism

In: Modernist cultures, Band 1, Heft 1, S. 22-46

Abstract

In "The Shropshire Schizoid and the Machines of Modernism" Edward P. Comentale considers the work of A. E. Housman, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis in order to engage with modernism from a perspective indebted to the theories of Deleuze and Guattari. Comentale thus intervenes polemically in recent attempts to rethink and revise scholarly conceptions of Modernism. "The Shropshire Schizoid" argues that critical understanding of Modernism should not be based on oedipal accounts of Modernist textuality that construe desire as founded upon lack. In his detailed readings of key works by Housman, Lawrence, and Lewis, Comentale seeks to elaborate a reading practice which returns us to Modernism's original generative power, its capacity to create new articulations of desiring-production within the circuits and flows of capitalist modernity. Contending that criticism is insufficiently attentive to the explosive impact of desire within Modernist art and writing, Comentale suggests that it should be more attuned to the productive technologies that shaped modernity. His essay thus reconceives contemporary cultural analysis as a form of impassioned engineering. Following this model, scholarship functions as a mode of production that responds to Modernism's own deterritorializations and reterritorializations, and thus participates in an ongoing process of critical coding and recoding.