Modern Feels: Interwar Britain and the Bodily Politics of Visual Social Media

Abstract

Modern Feels: Interwar Britain and the Bodily Politics of Visual Social Media, juxtaposes interwar texts with digital theoretical concepts in order to examine how everyday media use impacts subjects’ responses to material human bodies. I assemble a multimodal archive from 1930s Britain—Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies, a selection of Lee Miller’s photography, and publications from the Mass-Observation Movement—that connects the period’s increasingly pervasive mass visual media ecology to subjects’ capacities for regarding both individual and mass historical trauma. Each chapter locates a different digitally native phenomenon (“real time,” algorithmic filters, and sousveillance) in one of these texts in order to reframe these terms’ meanings and to foreground their effects on human habits of sense-making. I draw on these connections to forward a theory of media history that does not rely on direct equivalences or causality between the modern and the contemporary; instead it leverages both eras to identify modes of embodied, relational reading that technologies can habituate in human subjects without deterministically circumscribing these practices within particular devices.

This approach draws attention to how everyday reading practices form a connective tissue between bodies and media that is often overlooked in posthuman models of technogenesis. Moreover, tracing seemingly benign habits of reading to encounters with violence in the fraught political context of the 1930s—an era haunted by the lingering trauma of WWI, anxiously anticipating WWII, and plagued by the rise of fascism—underscores the stakes of attending to everyday mass media practices across both eras. Just as repeated contact with images of injured bodies in the media may numb viewers and shape their real life responses to pain, my dissertation argues that mundane habits of media readership can likewise inure subjects to violence with profound political consequences. Through its historical juxtapositions, Modern Feels offers new interpretations of 1930s texts and new definitions of digital concepts that link both to embodied practices of sense-making and an ethics of encountering the pain of others.