Reflex Modernism

Abstract: In Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex , Timothy Wientzen explores an influential turn toward reflex in modernist literature and culture. Tracing early research on unconscious human behavior through the fields of experimental psychology, propaganda, advertising, and political theory, the book argues that a new politics of reflex emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century. Wientzen shows how this politicization of unthinking behavior shaped the form and content of work by several modernist writers and constitutes an instructive genealogy of our current political and cultural environment.