Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life

Explores how modernist fiction interrogated the many promises of ubiquitous media connectivity as key to collective life.

In Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life, Aleksandr Prigozhin explores how modernist fiction responded to its changing media environment in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers used diverse forms of media, broadly conceived--from print, architecture, and radio to soil and infrastructure--as metaphors for the contradictions of common life, while highlighting both the promises and failures of media modernity.

Media’s complex relationship to affect and sociality allowed modernists to imagine how disparate lives might be linked together through modes of impersonal intimacy. Through close readings of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Andrei Platonov, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, among others, Prigozhin reveals how their works leverage media’s ability to connect and divide. These texts grapple with the challenges of mass democracy, imperial decline, and the growing ubiquity of media communication, offering a nuanced vision of the difficulties of mediated human connection.

This interdisciplinary study bridges literature, media theory, and cultural history, showing how modernist novels illuminate the entangled relationship among materiality, affect, and social structures. Tracking their engagement with media and matter, Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life reveals a politics of the common at the heart of modernist fiction.

Aleksandr Prigozhin has taught English and Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and the University of Denver.