This rigorous and original study combines theories of the public sphere, cinema, and visual culture with a growing body of critical work on affect. While modernist feeling is often described either as a reservoir of romantic inwardness or as an inhuman hostility to sentiment, Justus Nieland challenges these notions by approaching emotion through a poetics of modernist publicity. He argues that modernists championed feelings as primarily public products of modernity rather than as the private property of the self.

Nieland's fresh account of the moderns' revolutionary designs on...

A key figure in the ongoing legacy of modern cinema, David Lynch designs environments for spectators, transporting them to inner worlds built by mood, texture, and uneasy artifice. We enter these famously cinematic interiors to be wrapped in plastic, the fundamental substance of Lynch s work. This volume revels in the weird dynamism of Lynch s plastic worlds. Exploring the range of modern design idioms that inform Lynch s films and signature "mise-en-scene, " Justus Nieland argues that plastic is at once a key architectural and interior design dynamic in Lynch s films, an uncertain way of...