Awkward Moments: Melodrama, Modernism, and the Politics of Affect

Abstract

The modernist privileging of irony and detached contemplation frequently combined with a recognition of the social and artistic significance of affect. The relation between melodramatic structures of feeling and modernist innovation is evident in two plays of the interwar years: Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann'sHappy Endand W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood'sOn the Frontier.Scholars need to develop a vocabulary that complements the customary critical emphasis on modernist “irony,” “estrangement,” and “difficulty” and that can be used to reconstruct the full force of the modernist uses of affect. Instead of estranging melodrama to make it palatable to an audience trained in high modernism, the negotiations between sentimentality and avant-garde aesthetics inHappy EndandOn the Frontiertrigger a backward dialectical movement in which the modernist rallying call to “make it new” blurs into the established patterns of melodrama.

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