Toxic Media: Poison and Pollution in the Modernist Imaginary, 1915–1965 recovers a wider literary legacy invested in the concept of “toxicity” as a decidedly aesthetic term, connecting a growing awareness of environmental precarity to a new kind of ecological poetics. Scholars of modernist literature have, in recent years, taken the period’s engagement with toxicity more seriously, finding tropes of “toxic refreshment,” “toxic discourse,” or other variously ambivalent portrayals of the twentieth century’s hazardous wastes and by-products. Toxic Media, however, does not recuperate modernist writers as proto-environmental thinkers, but rather reexamines how the period’s art and literature contains eccentric descriptions that helpfully image toxicity as a process of mediation and thus extend the legacies of modernism far beyond its traditional, historical boundaries. In fact, this distinctly “modernist” sense of the toxic is more in keeping with the linguistics of toxicity, where the Greek toxicos rightly means “arrow,” not “poison.” The “toxic” has long been associated, therefore, with the media of dissemination and directionality, rather than discrete moments of poisonous irruption or exposure. In redirecting to the systems of exposure, rather than finite moments of exposure, Toxic Media hopes to chart new pathways into modernist studies as well as the environmental humanities, which often
privilege the dramatic event above the less visible media that serve as the conditions of possibility for those events. Between the years of 1915 and 1965, modernist writers were working through these very systems of exposure in the form of bodily breath, urban infrastructure, and sites of waste. From World War I poetry to the writings of the Black Chicago Renaissance, from the high forms of poetic Symbolisme to the contemporary articulation of ecopoetics, modernist accounts of the toxic are invaluable for the way they redirect attention to ecological and literary media, ultimately demanding a new archaeology of toxicity as a medium unto itself.