Nathan Wainstein, "Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel" (JHU Press, 2026)

But let's let's let's go into that kind of solo.

Let's take a step back.

bad writing in the modernist novel.

So what was interesting after I finished it was I'm like, well, Nathan could apply this to bad writing in Victorian elegies.

You could pick your own niche thing and do your method towards it.

But let's talk about modernism and why you chose that field, right? Because you go through four writers.

We'll go into each one.

But what's the difference between bad modernism and just modernism? Because that's a big part of your intro.

Absolutely.

This is something that came to me, I won't say late in the project, but it wasn't the starting point.

This was originally a project that was trans-historical to the extent that I was working with a lot of 19th century fiction, actually Victorian novels.

and my primary sort of methodological interest was just this way in which um as i argue in the book uh criticism seems weirdly fascinated by uh attracted to maybe even obsessed with moments where literary form i sentences structures narratives don't seem to be working correctly You know, there's just this widespread fetishization of what I call the negative moment or the deviant moment.

And this is something, you know, I first became interested in in relationship to more recent theoretical paradigms.

So like deconstruction, you know, is really love when things are breaking down, right? Contradicting themselves.

New criticism has a similar interest in paradox.

You know, the last chapter of William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity is full contradiction, right? So when poems are outright contradicting themselves, that also could be a generative aesthetic effect.

Freudian psychoanalysis, and maybe particularly in its sort of More modern instantiations as trauma theory is obsessed with moments where there are repetitions, right, or elisions in a story, i.e. moments where, again, the story isn't obeying normative rules of narrative grammar.

And those are the moments that seem most ripe for interpretation, right? That's where repression is happening or can be surfaced.

Even something like the more politically inclined criticism of a Jameson or an Adorno attends to dissonances, right, ruptures.

Again, moments that seem negative, where there's a feeling of torsion, right, or of pressure that maybe is warping aesthetic or literary form.

So I was thinking about the way that, like, right, there are all these different ways of taking something negative on a formal level in a novel and making it into something really interesting or good or aesthetically generative.

And I wanted to put some pressure on that because my thought, and this goes back to my own inclinations as a close reader, I myself long... sought out those same negative moments you know like i was like uh very very early on in my time in grad school i had this crisis of confidence where i was like why do i want my novels to be so uh weird like why do i want them to not work right i'm disappointed actually when they seem to function correctly you know um take as a tip like as a test case i find something i'm like hey is that a um in the narration of a series of events, wait a minute, do those events not actually map up right on a linear chronological timeline? I might get really excited about that as a critic or as a reader or as a graduate student.

And if I were to find out that they actually do make sense, I think that not just I, but many readers would feel like a little bit of disappointment, right? Be like, Oh, I guess it's not that weird.

You know, I guess it's actually working correctly.

And that just, that itself seemed very weird to me.