ABSTRACT
Modernism began as a formal and literary-historical category. It has since become political (Jameson 1988b, I, ch. 2; II, chs 6, 7; Eagleton 1989) and gendered (Scott 1990). Here I shall resume the discussion of its psychopathology initiated in Chapter 14. ‘The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by the. artist,’ T.S.Eliot wrote, ‘is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty.’ Eliot thought Dante one of the few writers to encompass ‘the complete scale from negative to positive’. Most gravitate towards the lower end of the scale. ‘The negative is the more importunate’ (1932, p. 169). In Modernism, the negative was always importunate.
