Modernism’s Cares

Abstract

AbstractModernist authors used innovative narrative forms to represent the inherently uneven social and affective dynamics of care. Modernity had a transformative impact on the social organization of dependency and the nature of care work, and modernist literature explores the contradictory effects of such changes on vulnerable persons and those who sustain them. This may seem a surprising claim about a movement known for embracing youth, vigor, and newness. However, relations of care—and associated conditions of dependency, frailty, and toil—remain central to modernist aesthetic and social commitments, overlapping the more familiar preoccupations with subjectivity, relatedness, collaboration, and temporality. Two celebrated modernist works—Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives and William Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury—serve as examples of how interdependency and care provide a critical lens for reading literary texts, illuminating overlooked characters and themes, and offering new insight about their experiments with form.