“Reevaluating one of the most familiar critical truisms about the period, Losing the Plot is an erudite, elegant, and insightful exploration of modernism’s ambivalent relationship to plot. Reading Larsen alongside Garbo, or Barnes alongside Dietrich, Dabashi shows us how the encounter with commercial narrative cinema allowed modernist writers to negotiate the double feelings of repudiation and longing for stability and coherence associated with the closure and teleology of plot.”

Dora Zhang, University of California, Berkeley

“Losing the Plot is an extremely ambitious book, one that aims to fundamentally rewrite and revise our understanding of modernist aesthetics in film and literature. By recasting plot as a modernist fantasy, and then by showing how cinema served as a model of that fantasy, Dabashi is able to provide an entirely original way of thinking about the relation between cinema and modernism, and indeed about modernism itself.”

Daniel Morgan, University of Chicago