Table Of ContentAffective Materialities
University Press of Florida
Florida A&M University, Tallahassee
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers
Florida International University, Miami
Florida State University, Tallahassee
New College of Florida, Sarasota
University of Central Florida, Orlando
University of Florida, Gainesville
University of North Florida, Jacksonville
University of South Florida, Tampa
University of West Florida, Pensacola
AFFECTIVE
MATERIALITIES
Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature
Edited by
Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall,
and Robin Hackett
University Press of Florida
Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton
Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers · Sarasota
Copyright 2019 by Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
This book may be available in an electronic edition.
24 23 22 21 20 19 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Watts, Kara, editor. | Hall, Molly Volanth, editor. | Hackett, Robin,
1963– editor.
Title: Affective materialities : reorienting the body in modernist literature
/ edited by Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett.
Description: Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018029687 | ISBN 9780813056289 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Literature) | English literature—History and
criticism. | Literature and science. | Affect (Psychology) | Ecocriticism.
| Ecology in literature.
Classification: LCC PR888.M63 A44 2019 | DDC 820.9/3561—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029687
The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System
of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast
University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida,
University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South
Florida, and University of West Florida.
University Press of Florida
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http://upress.ufl.edu
CONTENTS
List of Figures vii
Acknowledgments ix
1. Into the Ether: An Invitation to Bodily Reorientations 1
Molly Volanth Hall and Kara Watts
2. Flesh over Granite: Walt Whitman’s Embodied Presence in William
Carlos Williams’s “History” 33
Karen Guendel
3. E. M. Forster among the Ruins 55
Stuart Christie
4. “‘I’m not sick,’ I said. ‘I’m wounded’”: Disrupting Wounded
Masculinity through the Lyrical Spaces of War 79
Cheryl Hindrichs
5. Frustrated Energies in Modernism’s Female Arrangements 103
Judith Paltin
6. “Things were in people, people were in things”: Language, Ecology,
and the Body in H.D. 123
Kim Sigouin
7. Cold Crystal: The Ecology of Affect in Herbert Read’s The Green
Child 147
William Kupinse
8. “I wanna be your puppy”: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and the Queer
Cute Body 172
Anna Christine
9. The Brain and the Living World in Janet Frame’s Faces in
the Water 192
Mary Elene Wood
10. “Becoming Animal, Becoming Other”: Modernism, Millennial
Jurisprudence, and the Limits of Materialist Subjectivity 213
Kathryn Van Wert
11. Black Girls and Lady Police: Blank Affect and the Ecology of the
Gym 236
Robin Hackett
List of Contributors 255
Index 259
FIGURES
1.1. Man as Industrial Palace (Der Mensch als Industriepalast), by Fritz
Kahn, 1926 15
1.2. Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), by Marcel Duchamp, 1912 16
3.1. Hand-drawn map of Alexandria, by E. M. Forster 62
3.2. Kom es Chogafa, by E. M. Forster 65
11.1. Gym sign, no age limits, photo taken by Robin Hackett 247
11.2. Gym sign, age limit of two, photo taken by Robin Hackett 248
11.3. Gym sign, age limit of four, photo taken by Robin Hackett 248
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The impetus for this collection came from our double panel session,
“Touching the Body in Pieces,” at the 2016 meeting of the Northeast
Modern Language Association. The work herein would not have been
possible without the provocative scholarship and debate that began
there, so to those original panelists and audiences, we offer sincere
thanks. We also wish to thank our editor at the University Press of Flor-
ida, Stephanye Hunter, for taking on our project and supporting it at
every stage, as well as Marthe Walters, and the entire team at UPF. We
are grateful as well to the two anonymous readers whose encouraging
comments and helpful recommendations invariably made this volume
stronger.
We are indebted to the University of Rhode Island’s Center for the
Humanities, which gave financial support for this project in the form of
a generous subvention grant. We owe much to the University of Rhode
Island and the University of New Hampshire, whose support along
with that of our English Department colleagues makes research an even
greater pleasure. Finally, we wish to thank profusely our contributors for
their patience and hard work—their provocative ideas have made this
collection an exciting example of what modernist scholarship can do.
We thank New Directions Publishing for allowing us to reproduce
portions of works by William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Herbert Read;
the Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and the Society
of Authors as the literary representatives of the E. M. Forster Estate for
allowing us to reproduce portions of works by E. M. Forster; the Estate
of Langston Hughes, Penguin Random House, and David Higham As-
sociates for allowing us to reproduce a portion of Langston Hughes’s po-
etry; the Author’s League Fund and St. Bride’s Church for granting us
the ability to reproduce portions of Djuna Barnes’s works; and the Janet
