Willed Passivity, Furious Martyrdom

A Centre for Modern Studies Postgraduate Forum event 

'She has a nice healthy bent for self-immolation, not unfortunately, I must confess, directed by any considerable tact or discretion. She is apt to lie down on the altar at the wrong moment—even to mistake all sorts of unrelated things for altars. She once lay down on the pavement of the Boulevard Sebastopol and continued to lie there heroically till, with the help of a cop, I bundled her into a cab.'

This description of a lover comes from the protagonist of Wyndham Lewis’s novel Tarr. Lewis’s work forms the focus of this talk, which is rooted in a consideration of modernist passivity, sentience, and satire, in which the above quotation proves emblematic.

Dr Sara Crangle is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sussex, where she directs the Centre for Modernist Studies. She is the author of Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation, which addresses Joyce, Stein, Beckett and Woolf in relation to Levinas, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Her 2008 essay 'The Time Being: On Woolf and Boredom' won the Margaret Church Memorial Prize. She has recently edited a collection of Mina Loy's unpublished prose.