The Modernist Art of Hunger

Abstract

Chapter 1 reconstructs the canon that forms the basis of later writers’ deployment of the art of hunger. It sketches the aesthetic framework of the art of hunger through four of its exemplary texts—Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and the poetry of Rimbaud—and locates these foundational writings in the context of their later redeployment by surrealist and “lost generation” writers. Reading these texts and authors both in their own moments and as they have been read by later writers and scholars, it seeks to derive the theory of art that later writers engage with when they redeploy the art of hunger in new contexts.