The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life

Davis examines late modernism's turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder. The Extinct Scene reads a range of mid-century texts, films, and phenomena that reflect the decline of the British Empire and shifts in the global political order. Davis recasts late modernism as an art of scale: by detailing the particulars of everyday life, the movement could better project the large-scale undoing of history.

Examines late modernism’s decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder.