He opens a window just to feel the chill

In the fall of 2014, I taught an elective course for English majors focusing on British modernism (my particular academic specialty). We read a selection of essays, novels, and poetry from the canon of "high modernist" literature -- Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Ford, Pound, Eliot, etc. Some obligatory Freud.

Modernism has the dubious distinction of being known as one of the more snobbish movements in English literature. Many of the lauded books of the period are deliberately, sometimes arrogantly difficult, with writers trying their damnedest to pursue lofty artistic goals without a ton of concern for paltry human readership. (Swirling some brandy and affixing a pince-nez, the modernist critic will note that being abstruse was part of the point for most of these authors, but that doesn't make it a more pleasant reading experience for those who like reading novels without needing a published companion text to explain what's going on.)

Also, as my students quickly discerned, modernist literature is, as an added bonus, pretty bleak and depressing. Modernism leans emo. Nearly all the books we read for my class prominently featured murder or suicide, insanity, wartime apocalypses, and/or stark nihilism. Even Virginia Woolf, she of the luminous prose, once described a garden of daffodils as "looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and so terrible," which is a terrifying way to describe a flower.

For the final, I tasked my students with an in-class writing assignment in which they had to write their own "modernist manifestos." (Fun fact: Zany, caftan-wearing ideologues that they were, a number of modernists wrote artistic manifestos.) Translated into pedagogical terms, I was basically asking my students to generate and defend a definition for modernism. I encouraged them to be creative. One of my students began her final with the following:

Last Tuesday, I walked back from our last class, came into my dorm room, and threw my bookbag on the common room floor. "We have to define modernism!" I groaned, "Modernism!" "What's modernism again?" asked one roommate, sleepily raising her head up from her textbook. "Oh, you know," said a second roommate, "It's those books Kate reads where it's always raining and everybody dies."

Clearly the bleakness stuck out to Kate more than the difficulty. Modernism isn't all like this, but "Always Raining; Everybody Dies" isn't an inaccurate tagline.

When I started grad school, I picked modernism as my specialty without much forethought, banking on the rationale that my favorite books from high school and college -- the books that, emotionally speaking, hit me squarely in the sternum -- were from the modern period. It's only later in my academic career that I've been prompted to put much thought into why I spiritually and professionally align myself with this difficult and dour field (as opposed to, say, Victorian literature and its organized tales of parlors and gossip, or Romanticism and its opium-fueled ramblings about pleasure-gardens).

I think it's fair to say that I, like most critics, appreciate difficult books for being analytically meaty. "Difficult" is usually code for "written like a weirdo," and it gives someone like me a lot to think about. ("But... why?" is an implicit question addressed in 65% of modernist literary criticism, and 98% of criticism on Gertrude Stein.) It's a rational reason for choosing to write a dissertation about modernism. Opaque and pedantic books make for an expansive wall to bang your head against.

At the same time, having a lot to discuss and caring about the discussion are two different things. Even the meatiest topics will drive you to frustration unless you're genuinely interested. When it comes to getting a Literature PhD, if you don't passionately love the books and authors you're studying in a way that might alarm and alienate strangers, you'll never make it to the finish line.

And when it comes to my field, although I appreciate the difficulty, what I love is "Always Raining; Everybody Dies." I love the gooey black heart of modernism. I love the terrible eyeless daffodils. I love the fact that modern novels tease you into empathy only to blindside you with abject horror. (See Ford Madox Ford, whose novel The Good Soldier sensitively explores themes of lost friendship and infidelity before ending with the titular character slitting his own throat in front of his best friend, a plot twist that receives less commentary in the criticism than you might expect.) While I don't always enjoy poetry, I love T.S. Eliot, whose poems exemplify modernism at its most melodramatic. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is basically an ode to the malaise that comes with believing yourself to be timid and boring and the searing dejection that comes with being correct. "The Hollow Men," meanwhile, suggests that when life has been degraded to torpid inertia, you might as well already be dead. The Waste Land is arguably the cheeriest of the three, and it contains the soul-pulverizing line, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

So, ultimately, is my love of modernism merely a highfalutin' manifestation of the inner emo kid that I never really indulged in my teenage years? Maybe. As far as I'm concerned, the important thing is that I'm having fun.