Encountering Anew the Ghosts of Modernism

In Haunting Modernisms, Matt Foley argues cogently that British modernists find they cannot attend to their hauntings through any typical form of mourning. Instead, to fashion new aesthetic movements and newly haunted post-war theories of ethics and desire, they must traverse the corridors of the ghostly. Through both poetic and fictional narratives, the figures of British modernism suggest the inheritances of trauma and terror both deplete and fuel our modes of resistance. But, as Foley reminds us, if we aim to encounter anew the ghosts of modernism, we must also open ourselves up to the specters that haunt its forms of representation, aesthetic ghosts that promise a radical potential to productively haunt our practices of reading, being, and mourning together.