Self-Optimization in Modernist Culture (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9789004519862)

Our contemporary society is obsessed with the idea of self-optimization, a concept that implies the need to constantly work on improving oneself and one's appearance. The roots of postmodern self-optimization, however, lie in the cultural industries that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its equally profound and transient interest in new forms of expression, new ways of life, and new technologies, modernism thoroughly and critically embraced the idea of the self as something that can be created and recreated, either in accordance with or in contradiction to social norms. This book explores strategies of self-optimization developed in modernist literature and culture. In doing so, it offers a panoramic view of an often-overlooked aspect of European and North American modernity that anticipates our current postmodern crisis of the self.

Author: Thorsten Carstensen
ISBN-10: 9004519866
ISBN-13: 9789004519862
Publisher: Brill
Language: English
Published: 06/19/2025
Pages: 300
Format: Hardcover