Description: What does it mean for a modernist novel to fail?
Brief description: Nathan Wainstein is an assistant professor of English at the University of Utah. He is the author of Grant Us Eyes: The Art of Paradox in Bloodborne.
Review Quotes: "Literary critics are addicted to redeeming what lay readers (and the lay readers that survive within us) might just call bad writing. In this, Nathan Wainstein's brilliant book shows, we remain stringent modernists. A profound meditation on the boundaries of the modernist project, this is also a sharp, intimate account of what critics do, and a demonstration of how we might work more imaginatively."-David Kurnick, Rutgers University "This is the best book of and on close reading I have ever read. Wainstein's masterful interpretations of modernist novels are x-rays that simultaneously illuminate the occulted values of close reading itself."-Michael Clune, author of A Defense of Judgement "Bad Writing gives us a new vocabulary for understanding modernist aesthetics while showing that our deeply felt critical 'love' of failure is a legacy of modernism itself. Proceeding through a series of dazzling readings, Wainstein demonstrates how much we can still learn by paying close attention to literary form."-Dora Zhang, author of Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel