... and whose theory of “unpleasure” propels its broadest argument: what “marks the modernist period in the genealogy of pleasure is that unpleasure and difficult pleasure are elevated as aesthetic practices that require extraordinary kinds of reading practices and often entail a hostile relationship...

... not entirely unpleasurable. This cultural formation cried out for explication and explanation, and a plan for a book was born. As so often happens, that project took a differ- ent turn, but my curiosity about this phenomenon lingered; I recount this personal history to make it clear that I read Bring...

... choosing to desire, to earn her punishment. According to Jonathan Noyes: "masochism is not the love of submissiveness. It is not the pursuit of unpleasure or humiliation. It is a complex set of strategies for trans- forming submissiveness, pain, and unpleasure into sexual pleasure" (11...

... importance to the aesthetic effects of modernist prose. “[B]anal longings,” Crangle writes, are “most readily evident” in prose's “conflation of more commonplace writing with everyday emotive states” ( 24 ). Thus—perhaps paradoxically—modernist pleasure emerges from unpleasurable affects (boredom, banality...

... sublime (see Kant 132–33 ). While apatheia signifies the complete absence of emotion, and is therefore experienced by the subject as neither “pleasurable nor unpleasurable,” Norton's state of disaffectation “involves a deficiency of affect that is reflexively felt to be dysphoric—stultifying, tedious...