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The Ache of Modernism: Death, Affect, and Intersubjectivity in Twentieth-Century American Literature
Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3980-9873
Date Available
3-19-2026
Year of Publication
2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
College
Arts and Sciences
Department/School/Program
English
Faculty
Pearl James
Faculty
Matthew Giancarlo
Abstract
This dissertation suggests that we can locate, describe, and experience death as an aesthetic mood called the ache of modernism. The ache is an atmosphere found in twentieth-century literature that goes beyond simply “positive” or “negative” feeling and encourages audiences to come to an affective and existential relationship with their mortality. As an intersubjective mood deriving from an attunement on death, it illuminates the historical and philosophical moment of many twentieth-century authors while clarifying their texts’ continued resonance today. This project therefore draws on the thought of major philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and other thinkers contemporaneous with the modernist period, alongside affect-oriented thinkers and “post-critical” scholars from today.
In Appointment in Samarra (1934), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Cane (1923), Stoner (1965), and The Moviegoer (1961), authors depict or contemplate suicide, rituals of the dying process, tragic death, funerals, or the deathbed. The ache appears through distinct affects like love, alienation, hope, and the sublime, alongside certain formal or rhetorical commitments, such as epiphany, motifs, setting, and plot.
Paradoxically, death seems to bring people together and create community, rather than fracture it. This project takes seriously the suggestion that scholars can make valuable knowledge claims about embodied experience, affect, and phenomenology that contribute to our collective interpretive act.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2026.25
Archival?
Archival
Recommended Citation
Gergely, Alex, "The Ache of Modernism: Death, Affect, and Intersubjectivity in Twentieth-Century American Literature" (2026). Theses and Dissertations--English. 193.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/193
Included in
Aesthetics Commons, American Literature Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Modern Literature Commons
