Toxic Modernism / Modernist Intoxication

Organising committee:

Prof Julian Murphet, Dr Tamlyn Avery, Dr Benjamin Madden, Dr Ryan Johnson

This joint conference will be organised into three principal strands:

• A themed strand of presentations on the conference topic (see below)

• An un-themed, open strand of presentations on general topics in modernist studies

• Special sidebar sessions, including one on ‘Good Enough Art’ from Anna Kornbluh and one on ‘Australian Modernist Journals’

The conference will also feature special screenings of two films at a local cinema, musical performances at Elder Hall, public readings at the State Library, a trip to a winery in McLaren Vale, and a post-conference trip to Kangaroo Island.

Adelaide is a conveniently walkable city, with all major hotels, CBD, bars, and restaurants within easy walking distance from the University campus.

CONFERENCE THEME:

TOXIC MODERNISM/MODERNIST INTOXICATION

In 1916, interviewed for the New York Times, the poet-diplomat Robert Underwood Johnson took up the “new movement” in poetry: “There is an intoxication about the way our contemporary poets fling themselves into a dauntless quest for self-expression.” “Alas!,” he went on, “this is just the trouble! For intoxication is no more desirable in poetry than in the household. Intoxication is not the state of mind in which, as Matthew Arnold says, one may ‘see life clearly and see it whole’.”

Emerging from the opium-laced visions of the Romantics, and Emerson’s image of the poet as “intoxicated by imagination,” Nietzsche’s Dionysiac reading of the origins of tragedy in cultic intoxication established a grand interpretive schema with which to herald the New. Bacchanalian excess cleansed the doors of perception: wine-soaked abandon, liberation from subjectivity, cultic collectives, the anti-bourgeois carnivalesque, hashish-fuelled reverie, drug-stimulated dream states. Baudelaire, Apollinaire, and Strindberg concurred. The improprieties of modernism, those tendencies to lapse into apparent formlessness, have their springboard in the pharmakon: a chemical tarrying with the indeterminate.

As Johnson’s virulent rejection makes clear, however, this was always taken by the other side as a kind of illness, a poison in the bloodstream of the culture. To be intoxicated by ‘the quest for expression’ is to intoxicate one’s reader and so to render the culture itself toxic. Modernism intoxicates through its hypnotising affective textures, its chromatic ripples and pure aesthetic plunges; it works, as Eliot notoriously put it, by bypassing the consciousness and getting to work directly on the nerve-ends of the body. But the toxins it disseminates undermine traditional beliefs, tastes, and values. Even the Communist Left tended to see modernism as suspiciously like a tipsy petit-bourgeois salesman gazing into his own navel.

In East Asia, intoxicating substances pulsed through modernist texts. Novelists and poets struck Baudelairean poses as they experimented with form and language. The café, the cinema, and the theatre supplied material and psychical intoxicants to the denizens of Tokyo, Seoul, and Shanghai. While modernists like Tanizaki Junichirō and Park Taewon explored the surreal landscapes of the intoxicated mind, writers like Kobayashi Takiji and Lu Xun observed the effects of alcohol on the exploited workers driving the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the region. By the time the song “Is Saké Tears or Sighs?” became a hit in 1931 Japan, sake bottles had already become a bridge between the popular and refined, and the communist and fascist, camps of Asian modernism.

The temperance movement and modernism evolved cheek-by-jowl, in an instructive double-helix of mutual dependency and determination: the moral direction away from narcotics and the homeopathic treatment of capitalist modernity’s narcosis are joined at the hip. Not for nothing were many of the best analysts of the great malaise themselves notorious drunkards: Hemingway, Faulkner, Sakaguchi Ango, Jean Rhys, Flann O’Brien, Scott Fitzgerald, Kajii Motojirō, Dylan Thomas, Nakahara Chūya, Dorothy Parker, Joyce, Hiratsuka Raichō, Ray Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, and Elizabeth Bishop, to name a bare few. The remarkable final act of the movement, Lowry’s Under the Volcano, remains one of the most harrowing tellings of this particular tale of the tribe. Meanwhile, Jameson was not alone in heralding the ‘new dominant feeling tone’ of the postmodern: “the high, the intensity, exhilaration, euphoria, a final form of the Nietzschean Dionysiac intoxication which has become as banal and institutionalized as your local disco or the thrill with which you buy a new-model car.”

For our central theme, a collection of essays on which we will be looking to publish, we invite presentations and panels on any aspect of the toxicity and/or intoxication of modernism, including the following (other topics, equally welcome, will be streamed separately):

• Nietzsche’s ‘Dionysiac’

• Sexual jouissance and Freud’s cocaine

• The Harlem Renaissance’s chemical inductions

• Political intoxication and the ‘passion for the Real’

• Wagnerian intoxication and the Gesamtkunstwerk

• Bataille, Evil, and the vertigo of drunkenness

• Virginia Woolf’s wavelike “intensity & intoxication”

• The Dada Carnivalesque

• Spiritualism: manias of belief

• Wyndham Lewis’ ‘wild body’; Mina Loy’s ‘silver Lucifer’ and ‘Insel’

• Narco-cultures of modernity

• Futurist ‘intoxication of danger’

• Surrealism, Benjamin, and hashish

• Rimbaud’s bateau ivre; Strindberg’s absinthe-fuelled ‘inferno’

• The modernist toxification of the world

• Environmental costs of modernist architecture

• Barthesian bliss and intoxication

• Adorno and the lure of the Sirens

• Reefer madness

• William S. Burroughs

• Modernist toxic masculinity

• Alcohol and regional identity

• Caffeinated Asia

• Musical intoxication

• Labour movements and liquor

• Automatism/automatic writing

Please send suggested paper titles and proposals of approximately 200-250 words to Julian Murphet at julian.murphet@adelaide.edu.au. Panel proposals are also welcome. Please include a brief bio with your submission.

Submission deadline: July 24, 2026