“Make It New” and Fear It, Too: Neophobia and Affective Intermediality in D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce

This paper explores how modernist writers, specifically D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, employ intermedial techniques (ekphrasis, multimodality, sonic-textual layering, Bakhtinian parodying of media, etc.) to capture a collective experience of neophobia as the fear of modernity and novelty. Using examples from The Rainbow, Aaron’s Rod, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, the study discusses the concept of affective intermediality as cases of intermedialized textual elements targeting emotions and leading to actions; this helps examine how fear operates as a cultural and aesthetic collective concept, which is encoded in archetypal imagery, subconscious referencing and allusions, and medial suggestive forms. The hermeneutic method and close reading applied allow the conclusion that the writers reflect on the critical matters of the turbulent reality and, through affect and suggestiveness, impact the readers: they manifest the feeling of fear, refer to the subconscious, cause confusion and the sense of loss, puzzlement, and shock, bring forward empathy, comparison, and frustration. As an outcome, the collective memory targeted through neophobia becomes a veiled layer of modernist novels, an active construct of affective intermediality.