The Problem with Pleasure

Aldous Huxley decried "the horrors of modern 'pleasure,' " or the proliferation of mass produced, widely accessible entertainment that could degrade or dull the mind. He and his contemporaries, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, sought to radically redefine pleasure, constructing arduous and indirect paths to delight through their notoriously daunting works. Laura Frost follows these experiments in the art of unpleasure, connecting modernism's signature characteristics—such as irony, allusiveness, and obscurity—to an ambitious attempt to reconfigure bliss. Throughout, she recasts the period's high/low, elite/popular divides and formal strategies as efforts to regulate sensual and cerebral experience. Capturing the challenging tensions between these artists' commitment to innovation and the stimulating amusements they denounced yet deployed in their writing, Frost calls attention to the central role of pleasure in shaping interwar culture.

A revealing study of the sensual tensions powering the period’s formal and ideological innovations.

Laura Frost is a writer and scholar. Her work on sex, art, gender, literature, and film has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Bookforum, The Times Higher Education, Quartz, and elsewhere. She is also the author of Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism.

Saikat Majumdar:
Frost's book is a treasure-trove of difficult pleasures.

Judith Brown:
With its breezy erudition and fast-flowing, abundantly pleasurable prose, [The Problem with Pleasure] should find and delight a wide audience.

Daniel Green:
Laura Frost's The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents offers us an illuminating perspective on modernism.

Ryan Chang:
Passionate and provocative.... Frost's study of the vicissitudes of modernist unpleasure performs its argument quite well.

Linda Simon:
[Frost] is an irreverent, imaginative guide to modernism, and her own writing throughout this impressive study is a pleasure and a delight.

Fresh, invigorating, witty and profound, her book impresses on every page.... This is criticism at its very best and it deserves to top any reading list on Modernism.

An original and useful revision to our understanding of modernism.

John Paul Riquelme, Boston University:
Strikingly original both conceptually and in its readings of a diverse array of interwar authors from Joyce and Stein to Huxley and Loos, Laura Frost's revisionary study of literary modernism's relation to the pleasures of vernacular culture changes the terms of the debate concerning modernism and the great divide between high and low culture. Yet her study's implications resonate significantly beyond modernism and are urgently relevant to understanding and assessing our contemporary response to the easy pleasures of the digital.

Jennifer Wicke, University of Virginia:
A tour de force that will be widely and passionately read. Laura Frost has panache, acuity, incisiveness, and pleasure to burn. This is an important and shimmering book, a firework in its own right.