Leo Lipski: Disabling Modernity

I my dissertation I argue that Leo Lipski’s prose, written mostly in the 1950s, vividly renders modernity’s late stage, concurrent with the twentieth-century totalitarian projects in which the human body loses its singularity and individual value to become, instead, a mere vehicle for ideological, political, and collective pursuits. In the aftermath of the twentieth century’s atrocities, the human body in Lipski’s texts, once a central political concern, radically disintegrates and depreciates. In this disabling of the human body––a process foregrounded in Lipski’s work as well as life––modernity experiences its own undoing as its erstwhile focal point––biological life itself––is consistently negated