Includes bibliographical references and index.

List of Figures -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction: Self-Optimization in Modernist Culture --    Thorsten Carstensen and Mattias Pirholt -- Part 1 -- The Self -- 1 The Freedom to Become: Henri Bergson’s Recovery of the Unquantified Self --    Thomas Sutherland -- 2 Making the Violin Happy: A Posthumanist Analysis of the Failure of Self-Optimization in Selma Lagerlöf’s The Story of a Country House --    Ann-Sofie Lönngren -- 3 Policing the Self in Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction --    Peter Childs -- Part 2 -- Emotions and Nerves -- 4 “To Win Back the Right to Great Affects!” Nietzsche, Vitalism and Self-Optimization --    Paul Bishop -- 5 Knut Hamsun, America, and Walt Whitman: On the Use of Literary Criticism as Self-Optimization --    Eirik Vassenden -- 6 William and Henry James, the Neurasthenic Generation, and the Quest for Illness --    Wenwen Guo -- 7 Paul Lasker-Schüler and the Troubled Legacy of “Crip Pedagogy” at the Odenwaldschule --    Gunther Martens -- Part 3 -- Body and Gender -- 8 Naked Triumphs and National Renewal: Heinrich Pudor and the German Life Reform Movement --    Thorsten Carstensen -- 9 Perfect Bodies: Physical Culture and Self-Optimization in the United States Around 1900 --    Simon Wendt -- 10 “Perfection of the Life, or of the Work”: W.B. Yeats and the Struggle for Self-Optimization --    Peter Liebregts -- 11 The Tragedy of a Woman: Alma Karlin and the Fragmented Self --    Nicole Perry -- 12 Gender and Self-Optimization in Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi. Eine von uns and Das kunstseidene Mädchen --    Brangwen Stone -- Part 4 -- The Technology of Self-Optimization -- 13 Planning for Success: Gustav Großmann’s Method of Self-Rationalization as an Economic Theory of Behavior --    Ralph Köhnen -- 14 Henry Parland’s Cyborgs: The Problematic Perfection of Man --    Mattias Pirholt -- 15  Anthropotechnik ? Ernst Jünger’s Organic Constructions, Self-Optimization and Modernity --    Nicholas Saul -- 16 Neues Bauen, Neues Wohnen: Self-Optimization through Better Architecture --    Deborah Ascher Barnstone -- Index.

Our contemporary society is obsessed with the idea of self-optimization, a concept that implies the need to constantly work on improving oneself and one’s appearance. The roots of postmodern self-optimization, however, lie in the cultural industries that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its equally profound and transient interest in new forms of expression, new ways of life, and new technologies, modernism thoroughly and critically embraced the idea of the self as something that can be created and recreated, either in accordance with or in contradiction to social norms. This book explores strategies of self-optimization developed in modernist literature and culture. In doing so, it offers a panoramic view of an often-overlooked aspect of European and North American modernity that anticipates our current postmodern crisis of the self.

English

Description based on print version record.