High Modernist fragmentations came with terror, not celebration

Evidence

The Waste Land, with its fragmented surface, its polyglot ascription, its multicultural list of literary resource and ideological possibility, its malevolence towards working women and the sexuality of popular classes, its aristocratic affiliation, its dazzling technical resolution for the sense of unbelonging and inner ennui, is of course the central document of Anglo-Saxon modernism; Ulysses would be in most respects comparable, but most of its productive aspects come from the fact that it is not Anglo-Saxon. In none of the major modernists, however, was the idea of the fragmented self, or the accompanying sense of unbelonging, ever a source of great comfort; it came, usually, with a sense of recoiling, even some terror. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 218

Categorization

• XREF: Sets up the contrast Ahmad will draw with postmodernism’s celebratory embrace of fragmentation in the next paragraph — the pivot of the whole chapter. — connects to: Foucault traces the subversion of the Cartesian subject to Modernist literature and philosophy — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 287