SOURCE: Nicholls, Peter. “Cruel Structures: The Development of Expressionism.” In Modernisms: A Literary Guide, pp. 136-64. London, England: Macmillan, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Nicholls focuses on the elements of linguistic and sexual violence in the poetry and drama of the Expressionist period.

In previous chapters we have seen Paris emerge as a magnetic cultural centre, as the very hub of European modernist activity. Here a sense of energy and dynamism brought art and metropolitan life into powerful association—the Paris of Delaunay was preeminently the city of light, colour, and movement, the city where expanding consumerism had acquired an exciting erotic aura. If that sense of erotic modernity was connected, via the new painting, with an attack on forms of representation, it was above all because the Symbolist preoccupation with desire as the response to loss was now being called into question by the sense of modernity as...