Presented by the IHC Modernist Studies Research Focus Group
Friday, December 6 / 3:30-5:00 P.M. / Free
South Hall 2635

Aldous Huxley once claimed that speed has been the only new pleasure invented by modernity. Enda Duffy suggests it is time that we explore in detail the complexities of this extraordinary new pleasure, that we outline a grammar of speed. At the opening of the twentieth century, the invention of the automobile and the rush to own one made for a moment in which speed was offered to the bourgeois consumer as concrete individual experience. People had to be educated to the enjoyment and management of this new pleasure, as their sense of space and place was reordered, as new ways of instant seeing and the value of the fleeting glance had to be worked out, and as the role of energy as a measure of human subjectivity itself was altered. In the high art of the period, from the Futurists to Duchamp, the idea of speed "was in the air," and the aesthetics of modernist shock, in particular, offered a kind of kinesthetic guide-book to the exhilarations and crash dangers available to those who enjoyed this new pleasure to excess. While writers such as E.M. Forester bemoaned the "craze for motion," the new pop culture genres, especially film with its car chases, were heavily invested in promoting speed's pleasures. Looking at a range of these incitements and prohibitions, Duffy considers what was at stake in the new access of masses of people to speed as pleasure: can we construct a politics as well as a grammar of speed?

Enda Duffy is an Associate Professor in the English Department at UCSB. He is the author of "The Subaltern Ulysses" (University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Currently he is co-editing a collection of essays on connections between the work of Joyce and Walter Benjamin, and completing a book on speed and modernism from which this talk is taken.

This event is cosponsored by the IHC Modernist Studies Research Focus Group and the Department of English.

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