‘Interrupted Trains of Thoughts: Modernism and Urban Transport—An Aesthetics of Disruption’

Taking Ford Madox Ford’s Soul of London (1905) as a starting point of an author’s impression of London in the early 20th century, and focusing then essentially on E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) as well as on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), this paper contends that the city at the turn of the 20th century was both a disrupted and disrupting environment, which these writers managed to represent by elaborating an aesthetics of interruption, based on an acceptance of disruption as a fruitful force. Modern public transport in that regard played a major role in London’s transformation into an ever more urban, rapid, and crowded space, turned it into quite an ungraspable object for contemporary writers. Depicting this bustling and disorienting urban space became a challenge for our authors, who used urban travel as a vehicle through which both to express and process this disrupting urban life. Both Forster and Woolf thus met the apparently impossible challenge set by Ford, of finding a form to represent this disruptive city, by crafting an aesthetics of interruption—or disruption, which, as these authors demonstrate, turns out to be fruitful in more ways than one