Happy modernisms

Can modernism be happy? Or perhaps the question should be: can modernist studies be happy? These questions started to preoccupy me some time ago when I was seven weeks into teaching my undergraduate course in modernist literature at Western Sydney University. As we were about to turn our attention to Jean Rhys’s novel Voyage in the Dark (1934), I felt compelled to apologize to my students. I was asking them to delve into yet another textual universe of trauma, alienation, and unease. The only somewhat playful relief on offer that semester was Un Chien Andalou (1929)—hardly a set piece for eudaimonia. I assured my students that modernism was not all doom and gloom: modernists had fun, they could throw a good party. At the conclusion of the course, I routinely show archival footage of people dancing the Charleston to demonstrate just how much fun modernism can be. But in all seriousness, this experience prompted me to start thinking about the question of modernism and happiness, and why it has remained such a conspicuously absent topic in modernist studies both past and present.