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Taking the Smooth with the Rough: Texture, Emotion, and the Other Postmodernism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Pansy Duncan
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Abstract

Postmodern aesthetics' vaunted hermeneutic flatness is routinely equated with emotional flatness. In large part, it is this equation that underpins postmodernism's fall from favor in the face of the critical humanities' recent turn to the analysis of affect and emotion. Through a close reading of David Cronenberg's paradigmatically postmodern film Crash (1996), however, this essay draws on a long-standing lamination of texture to emotion in order to undertake a radical reappraisal of postmodernism's emotional life—recoding postmodern aesthetics' notoriously flat, depthless surface as a richly textured plane that oscillates between the high polish of the glossy surface and the cragginess of the rough. In doing so, the essay argues not only that postmodern aesthetics is unexpectedly hospitable to emotions but also that an analysis of these emotions may help to reconfigure sedimented scholarly understandings of the relation between surface and depth, true emotion and false, critical “then” and critical “now.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 129 , Issue 2 , March 2014 , pp. 204 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2014

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