Kevin Tunnicliffe

Dissertation Title: Literary Modernism and the Aesthetics of Numbness

Supervisor: Stephen Ross

Accounts of modernist aesthetics typically describe a realm of shock, speed, and the new that jolts the degenerate, complacent, or stagnated reader awake to an acute aesthetic reinvigoration. My research follows a contrary understanding of Anglo-centric literary modernism that acknowledges its pervasive anaesthetics, which I define as a mode of formal experimentation that takes numbness and insensibility as its key aesthetic elements. Studying the intersection of aesthetics, affect, and the medical humanities, I am interested in what happens when one is numbed to, cut off from, or otherwise unable to rely on his or her senses. Representations of numbness may be fundamentally shaped by factors such as trauma, intoxication, pressures of modern society, and even language, but this anaesthetic lens allows us to question what happens both within the text and when we, as readers, must make sense of narratives that are shaped by truncated, distorted, or fallible sensory input.