Conclusion

Abstract

AbstractThe conclusion highlights how Troubling Late Modernism recalibrates our understanding of modernist narrative techniques, showing them to be far more ethically fraught than other historians of postwar modernism, who have celebrated their ethical or political efficacy, have supposed. This analysis of the darker emotive uses of modernist aesthetics might be extended in future work either by exploring high modernist writers’ own hesitations about the affective power of the techniques they developed or by appraising whether the use of those techniques in more conventionally realist contemporary fiction amounts to a domestication of their most troubling qualities. The conclusion also elaborates on the wider contribution of the book’s engagement with debates about method, emphasizing how a more experiential approach to close reading reveals Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, John Banville, J. M. Coetzee, and Eimear McBride to be more philosophically challenging writers than the ubiquitous epistemological accounts of their fiction would have us believe. After reflecting on the book’s contribution to affect studies, the conclusion closes with the suggestion that its greater advocacy is ultimately for a more aesthetically generous and pragmatic approach to critical method, capable of reorienting criticism of modernist fiction towards what matters most—the experience of reading such troublingly compelling prose.