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Chapter 3 - Crowds and Transformation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2020

Judith Paltin
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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Summary

Chapter Three, “Crowds and Transformation,” synthesizes concepts of self-recovery, play, and collective intellect to explore what transformative tools and practices crowds were developing (in modernist fictional worlds) in order to identify and represent themselves, or to have as tactical weapons during their conflicts with elite authority. Conventional identity is creatively reworked by disarticulated performances such as Clarissa’s or the unnamed Captain in The Secret Sharer. The chapter maps mechanisms that produce modernity’s porous and transmissible social mind, exemplified in readings of Jacob’s Room and “Ithaca,” for example. Historical examples of street demonstrations and popular movements in the first decades of the twentieth century in England and Ireland are compared with readings of the permeable and suggestible crowds of “Wandering Rocks” and Wyndham Lewis’ writings, to differentiate what the book identifies as rising crowds from Lewis’ crowds of “extinction.” Finally, the chapter transitions to the concept of crowdedness as an ethical experience.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Crowds and Transformation
  • Judith Paltin, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book: Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd
  • Online publication: 19 November 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108907026.004
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  • Crowds and Transformation
  • Judith Paltin, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book: Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd
  • Online publication: 19 November 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108907026.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Crowds and Transformation
  • Judith Paltin, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book: Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd
  • Online publication: 19 November 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108907026.004
Available formats
×