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Linttell, Anne E. Carleton University Dissertation English. "Darkness in the work of Djuna Barnes." Ottawa, 1994.
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Shin, Ery. "Modernism and the queer : Djuna Barnes/Gertrude Stein." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:71b77d1c-7981-497a-a5c5-8113f5d08c7f.
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Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein may appear unrelated to one another at first glance. We have an impoverished upstate New Yorker versus relatively comfortable Californian, bisexual romantic nomad versus lesbian monogamist, nihilist versus life-affirming enthusiast, and agnostic-atheist versus secular Jew. When they are referenced together (which happens rarely), it is usually in the context of their Parisian exploits. But a closer look reveals more vital affinities. Both writers remain problematically situated in the modernist canon. Both were inspired by visual art. Both struggled to get published during their lifetimes. Both disassociated themselves from mainstream feminist movements, preferring subtler, more idiosyncratic ways of questioning the status quo. Both held a sustained interest in the queer and, as this dissertation seeks to demonstrate, imagined that theme in original ways—Barnes, through loss; Stein, through phenomenology. Writing out of the spirit of Christian martyrdom, Barnes revels in queer suffering and its transfiguring potential: queers extravagantly lose (themselves), fail, and suffer, yet such ordeals aren’t without value. The first half of my dissertation, thus, appraises Barnes’ “queer negativity” in general before pondering how its masochistic energies push against those authorities that would negate the queer. Chapter One analyzes Barnes’ mythical-seeming transgendered figures who encounter profound failure, despite the imaginative freedom emanating from their ahistorical surroundings. Barnes’ sense of queer failure intensifies in Chapter Two, where same-sex desire invokes the abject by symbolically collapsing psychic boundaries between lovers and refusing reproductive futurity. Both chapters contextualize the moral inversion that becomes the focus of Chapter Three: how does such nihilism tragically ennoble the queer and endow it with insurgent impulses? Without taking a self-consciously queer activist stance, Barnes draws on what Gilles Deleuze would later enunciate as an inverted affect regime: the power of punishment to enforce repressive sexual regulations through pain and hence to bridle perversion becomes inverted when punishment opens the portal to pleasure, when pleasure relocates to sites of perversion. If Barnes writes as a romantic martyr, Stein looks at the queer through a phenomenologist’s eyes. The reciprocity between social conditioning and consciousness, in particular, remains an urgent concern throughout her career. To be “queer,” one often breaks away from a lifetime of habituated orientations toward sex and gender. But queerness cannot wholly bracket the norms that have been left behind. It exists in relation to what it queers. Foregrounding this discussion, Chapter Four examines how Stein’s modernism, phenomenology, and queer criticism intersect. Chapter Five investigates how “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” “Many Many Women,” and The Making of Americans reorient us from the “straight” and narrow. Yet this reorientation remains partial. Not all heteronormative biases can be shed, as is evident in The Making of Americans’ classist undertones running through its “singular” queer vision. The sixth chapter further tests the limits of reorientation as such. Ida’s Ida desperately wants to live a queer life, but discovers that she cannot if she approaches queerness as a radically separatist ideal. A solipsistic universe where she can entirely withdraw from society through sleep, silence, or soliloquy remains a fantasy. Ida’s internal conflict, in turn, mirrors Stein’s struggle to enact aesthetic modes that prove just as impossible to practice, being devoted to eliminating memory, emotions, personal identity, and social awareness.
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Frödin, Ellen. "Hatten, dockan, capen, byrån : ting och tinglighet hos Djuna Barnes." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Avdelningen för litteraturvetenskap, 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-96807.
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The inhuman element in Djuna Barnes’s works has been widely acknowledged. So far the research has, however, concerned itself primarily with animality, thus neglecting the importance of things and thingliness in her texts. In this essay I outline a new way of approaching Barnes were things are taken into account as a vital element in her literary world, using theories on prostheses, fetishes and souvenirs. In Nightwood and four of the short stories, ”A Night Among the Horses”, ”Aller et Retour”, ”Cassation”, and ”The Grande Malade”, I examine clothing, interiors, collections, statues and dolls as objects that in different ways harbour meaning, dream, riddle, memory, history, longing and desire. The aim is not at translating these objects; my concern is not so much with what they mean, as how they mean; how they are used and thus how they interact with the characters.
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Armond, Kate. "Wyndham Lewis and Djuna Barnes : modernist writers and German expressionism." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.577645.
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This thesis considers the impact of German Expressionism on Anglo-American writers by focusing on the work of Wyndham Lewis and Djuna Barnes. Chapter One analyses Wassily Kandinsky's play Yellow Sound, and his theories of art, alongside Wyndham Lewis' Vorticist drama Enemy of the Stars. I trace similarities between the techniques used by both writers to develop awareness of spatial composition and non- representational form. Chapter Two rejoins Lewis in 1919 as he approaches the topic of art's potential to rehabilitate a war-torn society, and I argue that an examination of the work of Expressionist architects such as Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart allows insights into a particularly unusual moment in Lewis's career. By analysing the intellectual and ideological context of an architectural project with similar concerns, prejudices and goals, it is possible to see Lewis' pamphlet as an exceptional phase in his writing in which he teeters on the brink of approving political engagement for the arts and echoes many of the ideas promoted by Germany's Activist programme. These images of a revolutionary utopian architecture can be traced to Lewis' construction of the Magnetic City in The Human Age. Chapters Three and Four explore Djuna Barnes' novel Nightwood in the context of Waiter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, acknowledging connections between seventeenth-century and Expressionist aesthetic forms at the time of Barnes' arrival in Berlin. Chapter Five considers the details of the Weimar stage and Schrei performance techniques and their particular significance for Barnes' portrayal of Dr. O'Connor and Robin Vote. The study concludes by reappraising the connections discovered between modernism and Expressionism in the context of Georg Lukacs' critique of the movment.
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McDonaugh, Karen Louise. "Subjection and subversion : a critical reading of Djuna Barnes' 'Nightwood'." Thesis, Cardiff University, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.399234.
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McNeary, Nora K. "Performative Identity in Djuna Barnes' The Ladies Almanack and Nightwood." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/848.
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This thesis discusses performative identity in Djuna Barnes' The Ladies Almanack and Nightwood. Barnes' characters create and perform their identities as an attempt to escape or subvert patriarchal norms and societal prejudices. In analyzing the marginalized performative identity categories (race, class, gender, sexuality), one can glean an understanding of the complex social tensions present during Barnes' era, and understand the socially constructed, confining nature of identity itself.
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Niven, Debra L. "Fictive elements within the autobiographical project : necessary conflation of genres in Nightwood by Djuna Barnes /." Electronic version (PDF), 2007. http://dl.uncw.edu/etd/2007-1/nivend/debraniven.pdf.
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Hocking, Nick. "An insubstantial defence of the Father, incorporating Djuna Barnes' melancholy corpus." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 2017. http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/288/.
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My thesis being a suitably rhizomatic proliferation of thematic obsessions, personal anecdotes, theoretical debates, political reflections, and close readings of several major works by Djuna Barnes, it feels like a particularly brutal kind of revisionary, reterritorialising horticulture would be required in order to state in a few hundred words what it is that I have tried to do, at root. But since I must, let’s say that the underlying preoccupation of my writing, oriented through a focus on various figures of the Father in Barnes’ writing, has been the (political, psychological and social) necessity of such en-tirpatory aggression: the selective, irreducibly ideological laying down of roots needed to construct an arborescent substance (such as a doctoral dissertation, or a social justice movement), and the role played in this kind of symbolic reordering by a retrospectively-posited legitimating figure (archetypally, the founding Father). In a vaguely Sedgwickian gesture I contest here that critical theory, and contemporary Leftist thought more generally, suffers by its one-sided approach to fantasies of substantial identity. Some of us steadily insist with heroic Stoicism on the phantasmic misrecognitions entailed in all stable identities, others are continually moving on from such passé essentialisms as Nation, Family, or Self, giddily repeating the same gestures at each vibrant new theoretical ‘turn’, with Sisyphean regularity. Critical theory therefore appears stuck with a body that it can neither internalise nor efface. Meanwhile the latest capitalist crisis has found the Left ready with convincing analyses, but a fractured and disorganised base; capable of mobilizing mass protest, but without the co-ordinated strategy or political will to ‘occupy’ dominant power structures or attract popular support beyond the embattled enclaves of academia and activism. A few years earlier, Wendy Brown diagnosed this situation as an endemic Leftist melancholia in which ‘the impulse to blame and complain tends to displace any impulse to develop strategies for the assumption of power’, but, paradoxically, she also suggested that we might yet successfully mourn the catastrophes of history while proleptically recognising that the objects of our mourning are insubstantial; ‘Something has died but we argue over what the body is (there will turn out not to be a body).’ Conversely, this thesis ultimately flirts with a post-Jungian mythopoetic ‘turn’ in arguing that we need to give substance back to our grief and expend a few lachrymose passages over our Father’s body, whoever he might turn out not to have been.
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Sepulveda, Maria C. "Centered Fluidity and the Horizons of Continuity in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood." FIU Digital Commons, 2012. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/746.
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Modern writers like Djuna Barnes allow for the post-modern fluidity and explosion of sex and gender without finalizing either in a fixed form. Whereas the classical, archetypal androgyne is made up of two halves, one man and one woman; the deconstructed androgynous figure is not constituted of oppositional terms which would reflect an essential and unimpeachable truth. I reveal the way Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood not only thematizes the fluid androgyne, but also cleverly verbalizes David Wood’s perpetual and un-dischargable “debt” to extra-discursivity while poetically critiquing gender “appropriateness,” societal constraints, and the constitution of identity. Barnes presents a decentralized, ungrounded and non-prescribed world in Nightwood not only through her cross-dressing and androgynous characters, but also in her poetics, her assertion of the open-ended quality of language, and a strong imperative to negotiate our physical existence in a world of fluid gender and sexual boundaries.
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Jonsson, AnnKatrin. "Relations : ethics and the modernist subject in James Joyce's "Ulysses", Virginia Woolf's "The Waves", and Djuna Barnes's "Nightwood /." Frankfurt am Main : P. Lang, 2006. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb40227023k.
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Warren, Diane. "Technologies of fragmentation : subjectivity and subversion in the major works of Djuna Barnes." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.391411.
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Ragkousi, Ioanna. "Writing technologies of the body in the work of Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein." Thesis, Paris 10, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017PA100058.
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Prenant pour point de départ le corps pour l’examiner au prisme de la technologie, cette études’intéresse aux représentations du corps dans quatre textes majeurs de Djuna Barnes et de GertrudeStein. Dans The Book of Repulsive Women de Barnes, les corps fragmentés décrits dans les poèmesdialoguent avec les représentations mécanomorphiques du corps féminins chez les Dadaïstes. Lerecueil s’apparente à une série de tableaux vivants exhibant des corps mécanisés vus depuis les ramesdu métro aérien new-yorkais. La discussion envisage ensuite Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights de Stein etles connections entre la métaphore de l’électricité et l’écriture cinématique de Stein. Le lien entre cespratiques est l’automatisme que Stein a étudié chez William James et qui transforme son texte en corpsautomate. Dans cette perspective, Wars I Have Seen de Stein constitue une expérience linguistique àcomparer avec l’écriture conceptuelle de Bob Carlton Brown. Chirurgienne littéraire, Stein opère letexte à l’aide de prothèses verbales. La dernière oeuvre étudiée dans cette thèse est The Antiphon deBarnes, qui est lue à l’aide de la relation conceptuelle entre le corps violenté de Barnes et le corps dutexte autobiographique, et peut être décodée à l’analyse de ses procédés métadramatiques. Dans ledernier chapitre, les deux auteurs sont repensées à l’aulne de leur incarnation personnelle dans leurstextes et des diverses manifestations de la notion du corps et de celle de la technologieHaving as a starting point the theme of the body and exploring it through the prism oftechnology, this study depicts its representations in four major texts by Djuna Barnes and GertrudeStein. Starting with Barnes’s The Book of Repulsive Women, the fragmented bodies depicted in thepoems come in dialogue with Dadaists’ mechanomorphic representations of female bodies. Thecollection is seen as a series of tableaux vivants displaying mechanized bodies through the alteringpresence of the El. The discussion, then, moves on to Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights andconnections are drawn between the metaphor of electricity and Stein’s cinematic writing. The linkingaspect of this association is the practice of “automatism” that Stein explored through William James,which leads to the point that her work is an “automaton” body of text. Following this, Stein’s Wars IHave Seen, is examined as a linguistic experiment compared to Bob Carlton Brown’s conceptualwriting. Stein as a linguistic surgeon operates on the text’s body with the help of word prosthesis. Thelast work in this study is Barnes’s The Antiphon, which is explored via the conceptual correlation ofBarnes’s violated body with her autobiographical textual body, examined through decoding Barnes’smetatheatrical devices. In the final chapter, these two writers are reexamined through their personalembodiment in the texts and through the various manifestations of the themes of body and technology
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Bellman, Erica Nicole. "Spectacular Shadows: Djuna Barnes's Styles of Estrangement in Nightwood." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2012. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/353.
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This paper examines Djuna Barnes's Modernist masterpiece, Nightwood, by exploring the author's particular styles of writing. As an ironist, a master of spectacle, and a visual artist, Barnes's distinct stylistic roles allow the writer to construct a strange fictional world that transcends simple categorization and demands close reading. Through textual analysis, consideration of how Barnes's characterization, and engagement with key critical interpretations lead to the conclusion that Nightwood's primary aim is to present the reader with an image of his or her own individual estrangement.
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Pollard, Jacqueline Anne. "The gender of belief: Women and Christianity in T. S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10333.
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x, 175 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.This dissertation considers the formal and thematic camaraderie between T. S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes. The Waste Land 's poet, whom critics often cite as exemplary of reactionary high modernism, appears an improbable companion to Nightwood 's novelist, who critics, such as Shari Benstock, characterize as epitomizing "Sapphic modernism." However, Eliot and Barnes prove complementary rather than antithetical figures in their approaches to the collapse of historical and religious authority. Through close readings, supplemented by historical and literary sources, I demonstrate how Eliot, in his criticism and poems such as "Gerontion," and Barnes, in her trans-generic novel Nightwood , recognize the instability of history as defined by man and suggest the necessity of mythmaking to establish, or confirm, personal identity. Such mythmaking incorporates, rather than rejects, traditional Christian signs. I examine how, in Eliot's poems of the 1920s and in Barnes's novel, these writers drew on Christian symbols to evoke a nurturing, intercessory female parallel to the Virgin Mary to investigate the hope for redemption in a secular world. Yet Eliot and Barnes arrive at contrary conclusions. Eliot's poems increasingly relate femininity to Christian transcendence; this corresponds with a desire to recapture a unified sensibility, which, Eliot argued, dissolved in the post-Reformation era. In contrast, Barnes's Jewish and homosexual characters find transcendence unattainable. As embodied in her novel's characters, the Christian feminine ideal fails because the idealization itself extends from exclusionary dogma; any aid it promises proves ineffectual, and the novel's characters, including Dr. Matthew O'Connor and Nora Flood, remain locked in temporal anguish. Current trends in modernist studies consider the role of myth in understanding individuals' creation of self or worldview; this perspective applies also in analyzing religion's role insofar as it aids the individual's search for identity and a place in history. Consequently, this dissertation helps to reinvigorate the discussion of religion's significance in a literary movement allegedly defined by its secularism. Moreover, in presenting Eliot and Barnes together, I reveal a kinship suggested by their deployment of literary history, formal innovation, and questions about religion's value. This study repositions Barnes and brings her work into the canonical modernist dialogue.
Committee in charge: Paul Peppis, Chairperson, English; Suzanne Clark, Member, English; John Gage, Member, English; Jenifer Presto, Outside Member, Comparative Literature
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Gillespie, Margaret. "Pour une poétique de l'altérité : l'oeuvre de Djuna Barnes, sur les marges du "modernism"." Paris 7, 2002. http://www.theses.fr/2002PA070073.
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Cette thèse tente d'examiner la problématique du concept de l'altérité, comme construction culturelle de la différence et étudie l'expression esthétique et générique à travers l'œuvre de l'écrivain américain Djuna Barnes. L'univers littéraire barnesien, hautement aporétique, se refuse à une catégorisation générique homogène, notamment du fait de la nature peu conventionnelle des sujets traités et des stratégies énonciatives employées à dans ses œuvres. Ses écrits tendent à la subversion des codes culturels, des paradigmes sexuels et raciaux et insistent sur les fractures de l'être et de toute forme d'identité. A travers le questionnement narratif de Barnes - celui du sujet confronté à son identité et plus spécifiquement son identité de genre - s'inscrit une expression toute particulière mais pertinente de la crise de la modernité. Les contradictions internes du "modernism" et surtout celle du statut du sujet masculin créatif, souvent obscurcies par une lecture classique de ce courant, se dévoilent explicitement à travers les œuvres dites "late modernist" de BarnesThis thesis problematizes of the concept of alterity, here defined as the cultural construction of difference, and studies the aesthetic and generic expression of alterity in the works of the American writer Djuna Barnes. Barnes's highly ambiguous "oeuvre" defies clear-cut categorisation, a fact compounded by the unconventional nature of her subject matter and the innovatory discursive strategies employed throughout the texts. Barnes's writing tends towards the subversion of both cultural codes and sexual paradigms, and underlines the divisions at the heart of all inscriptions of identity. Above all, underlying the questions posed in the course of Barnes's narratives, questions pertaining to the identity, and more specifically the gender identity of the subject, is a highly unique yet pertinent expression of the crisis of modernity. The internal contradictions of modernism, especially those relative to the status of male artist, often obscured in traditional readings of this current, reveal themselves with unusual clarity in Barnes's "late modernist" works
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Frödin, Ellen. "Tänja tiden ur sin buk : Nattens skogar och historia." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Institutionen för genus, kultur och historia, 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-15261.
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In this essay I trace the historical theme in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, stressing the importance of the concept of forgetfulness in the text. Read alongside Nietzsche’s On the Use and Abuse of History for Life as well as his later thoughts on genealogy, the novel can be seen to concern itself with that same dilemma of history that he articulates in his philosophy. That is: how not to be overburdened by historical knowledge to the point where it petrifies life and prevents any real and novel action, and how at the same time, to make oneself conscious of ones own historicity, so as not to be governed to much by the past. I argue that Robin inhabits what Nietzsche would call the unhistorical state, whereas the other characters, in contrast, struggle with their relation to the past. Their stories delineate how history is appropriated and the other made self through the use of masks, costumes, memorabilia, nesting, storytelling and bodily inscription.
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Dunbar, Erin. "The Sacred and the Profane: Nin, Barnes, and the Aesthetics of Amorality." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2009. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc11047/.
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Barnes's Vagaries Malicieux, and Nin's Delta of Venus, are examples the developing vision of female sex, and both authors use their literary techniques to accomplish their aesthetic vision of amorality. Nin's visions are based on her and her friends' extreme experiences. Her primary concern was expressing her erotic and amorally aesthetic gaze, and the results of her efforts are found in her aesthetic vision of Paris and the amoral lifestyle. Barnes uses metaphor and linguistics to fashion her aesthetic vision. Her technique in "Run, Girls, Run!" both subverts any sense of morality, and offers an interesting and challenging read for its audience. In "Vagaries Malicieux" Barnes's Paris is dark while bright, and creates a sense of nothingness, indicated only by Barnes's aesthetic appreciation.
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Tyler-Bennett, Deborah. "'A foreign language which you understand' : the art and life of Djuna Barnes, 1892-1982." Thesis, University of Leicester, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/34897.
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Conilleau, Claire. "L’écriture en déplacement, l’écriture du déplacement : H.D, Djuna Barnes et Laura (Riding) Jackson (1915-1944)." Thesis, Paris 3, 2013. http://www.theses.fr/2013PA030151.
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H.D., Djuna Barnes et Laura (Riding) Jackson incarnent trois visages du modernisme américain expatrié. C’est autour de leur place paradoxale dans le contexte d’instabilité et de circulation de ce moment littéraire que s’articulent leurs parcours respectifs. Cette thèse cherche à montrer comment l’expérience du déplacement géographique s’incarne dans le texte thématiquement, stylistiquement, grammaticalement, génériquement et dans le genre (gender) pour produire une écriture autobiographique déplacée qui interroge et transgresse les frontières. On analysera comment l’expatriation des trois auteurs et leur marginalité dans la communitas des expatriés produisent une écriture qui remet en question la limite entre personnel et impersonnel. On explorera les représentations du déplacement géographique lui-même comme thématique et esthétique. En adoptant une méthode de cartographie littéraire, nous mettons au jour une écriture nomade et interrogerons le rapport à la nation dans les textes qui travaille le trope du Grand Tour. L’analyse de l’esthétique du déplacement de l’autobiographie sur les éléments organiques du texte met au jour la métaphorisation du déracinement et le processus de déterritorialisation/reterritorialisation de l’expatriation et du genre féminin chez H.D., Barnes et (Riding) JacksonH.D., Djuna Barnes and Laura (Riding) Jackson embody three facets of American expatriate modernism. Their trajectories hinge on their paradoxical place in modernism’s context of instability and circulation. This thesis purports to show how their works are imbued with the experience of geographical displacement at various levels (thematic, stylistic, grammatical, generically and in gender). This porosity between life and work results in a displaced autobiographical writing which questions and transgresses frontiers. The first section deals with how these authors’ expatriation and marginality in the expatriate communitas produce texts which probe the limit between the personal and the impersonal. The second part focuses on the representations of the geographical displacement itself—both as theme and aesthetics. By resorting to a literary cartography method, we argue for a nomadic writing and interrogate the writers’ relation to the concept of nation in texts which deploy the Grand Tour trope. The final section analyzes the aesthetic transference of the autobiography on the organic elements of the text. These motifs act as metaphors of the subject’s uprootedness and of the deterritorialization/reterritorialization process at work for expatriate women writers
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Groves, Robyn. "Fictions of the self : studies in female modernism : Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/27310.
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This thesis considers elements of autobiography and autobiographical fiction in the writings of three female Modernists: Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes. In chapter 1, after drawing distinctions between male and female autobiographical writing, I discuss key male autobiographical fictions of the Modernist period by D.H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust and James Joyce, and their debt to the nineteenth century literary forms of the Bildungsroman and the Künstlerroman. I relate these texts to key European writers, Andre Gide and Colette, and to works by women based on two separate female Modernist aesthetics: first, the school of "lyrical transcendence"—Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf—in whose works the self as literary subject dissolves into a renunciatory "female impressionism;" the second group—Rhys, Stein and Barnes--who as late-modernists, offer radically "objectified" self-portraits in fiction which act as critiques and revisions of both male and female Modernist fiction of earlier decades.
In chapter 2, I discuss Jean Rhys' objectification of female self-consciousness through her analysis of alienation in two different settings: the Caribbean and the cities of Europe. As an outsider in both situations, Rhys presents an unorthodox counter-vision. In her fictions of the 1930's, she deliberately revises earlier Modernist representations, by both male and female writers, of female self-consciousness. In the process, she offers a simultaneous critique of both social and literary conventions.
In chapter 3, I consider Gertrude Stein's career-long experiments with the rendering of consciousness in a variety of literary forms, noting her growing concern throughout the 1920's and 1930's with the role of autobiography in writing. In a close reading of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I examine Stein's parody and "deconstruction" of the autobiographical form and the Modernist conception of the self based on memory, association and desire. Her witty attack on the conventions of narrative produces a new kind of fictional self-portraiture, drawing heavily on the visual arts to create new prose forms as well as to dismantle old ones.
Chapter 4 focuses on Djuna Barnes' metaphorical representations of the self in prose fiction, which re-interpret the Modernist notion of the self, by means of an androgynous fictional poetics. In her American and European fictions she extends the notion of the work of art as a formal, self-referential and self-contained "world" by subverting it with the use of a late-modern, "high camp" imagery to create new types of narrative structure.
These women's major works, appearing in the 1930's, mark a second wave of Modernism, which revises and in certain ways subverts the first. Hence, these are studies in "late Modernism" and in my conclusion I will consider the distinguishing features of this transitional period, the 1930's, and the questions it provokes about the idea of periodization in general.Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
Graduate
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Dunbar, Erin Armintor Deborah Needleman. "The sacred and the profane Nin, Barnes, and the aesthetics of amorality /." [Denton, Tex.] : University of North Texas, 2009. http://digital.library.unt.edu/permalink/meta-dc-11047.
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Ludwig, Jeff L. Breu Christopher. "Identity and flux American literary modernism of the 1920s & 1930s /." Normal, Ill. : Illinois State University, 2006. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=0&did=1251817851&SrchMode=1&sid=2&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1179419208&clientId=43838.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2006.Title from title page screen, viewed on May 17, 2007. Dissertation Committee: Christopher D. Breu (chair), Charles B. Harris, Hilary K. Justice. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 277-294) and abstract. Also available in print.
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Taylor, Clare L. "Female cross-gendered behaviour in the fiction of Radclyffe Hall, Anais Nin, H.D. and Djuna Barnes." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.302589.
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Smith, Claire. "I was a Movie, Flashing Transient Pictures Upon a Receptive Sky : Djuna Barnes and the Cinematic." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.504016.
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Hanrahan, Mairéad. "Djuna Barnes, Jean Genet et la différence des sexes, des sexualités : pour une poétique du désir." Paris 8, 1994. http://www.theses.fr/1994PA080877.
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Cette these etudie les questions da la difference sexuelle et de la difference homosexuelle dans un roman de djuna barnes, nightwood, et deux romans de jean genet, miracle de la rose et querelle de brest. Elle examine les deux auteurs separement. La premiere partie explore les liens metaphoriques et metonymiques entre trois figures de l'autre dans nightwood : le juif, l'homosexuel (le) et la femme; elle offre une intepretation de l'ordre enigmatique du recit, le lisant en fonction du deplacement de la figure de l'autre. Notre analyse de genet distingue la question de l'autre feminin de celle de l'autre homosexuel. Le chapitre sur le miracle propose que le miracle consiste pour genet dans la possiblite qu'offre l'ecriture de reveler une feminite symbolique la ou on s'attendait le moins a la rencontrer, et discute le fait que la feminite n'a de valeur pour genet que symbolisee. Le chapitre sur querelle explore le rapport que genet envisage entre l'homosexualite et la societe qui la reprime. L'importance de ces oeuvres pour une poetique du desir tient au fait que la reflexion sur la sexualite ne peut se dissocier d'un travail sur le langage : cette these vise justement a faire l'articulation de la pratique de l'ecriture et de la pratique du desirThis thesis studies the questions of sexual and homosexual difference in one novel by djuna barnes, nightwood, and two novels by jean genet, miracle de la rose and querelle de brest. It examines the two authors separately. The first section explores the metaphorical and metonymical links between three different figures of the other in nightwood, jew, homosexual and woman. It offers an interpretation of the enigmatic narrative of the novel, reading it in terms of the displacement of the figure of the other. Our analysis of genet distinguishes between the feminine other and the homosexu al other. The chapter on the miracle argues that the miracle for genet consists in the opportunity which writing affords of revealing a symbolic femininity where one might least expect to find it, and discusses the implications of the fact that genet values only symbolic femininity. The chapter on querelle explores the relationship which genet envisages between homosexuality and society. For both authors, the reflexion on sexual identity and orientation is intimately linked with a consideration of language. This thesis seeks to show the links between the practice of writing and the practice of desire
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Petalidou, Maria. "Go not with fanatics : modernist activities and artistic itineraries in the life and work of Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, and Romaine Brooks." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.326082.
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Fällman, Linn. "The first Woman born with a Difference : En komparativ queerläsning av Djuna Barnes Ladies Almanack." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Institutionen för genus, kultur och historia, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-3054.
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The aim of this thesis is a comparative study of Djuna Barnes' 1928 book Ladies Almanack and turn of the century sexological texts focusing on Havelock Ellis' studies of 'sexual inversion in women'. The study is based on queer theory concepts from Judith Butler and Fanny Ambjörnson as well as Michel Foucault's studies of the history of sexuality. After a presentation of the theoretical concepts and a short introduction of earlier research on Barnes' works my reading and conclusions are presented in five chapters focusing on different theoretical and thematic aspects of the studied texts. A recapitulation and discussion ends the thesis. In short, my conclusions are that Ladies Almanack contrary to earlier research can be read as a queer text, and a form of counter-discourse to the general one regarding lesbianism in the early 1900's. The text also reveals itself as a pointed critique and a satire of Havelock Ellis' writings on 'sexual inversion in women'. As well, when read against Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, perhaps the archetypal 'lesbian novel', Hall's book reveals itself as an echo of the same discourse Barnes opposes.
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Willoughby, Joanne Margaret. "Dialects of the deject : Djuna Barnes and the effects of abjection upon a language of (dis)ease." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.415594.
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Chait, Sandra M. "Writing the body spiritual : sexual/textual/spiritual links in the writings of Antonia White, Emily Coleman and Djuna Barnes /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9519.
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Gillespie, Nancy Elizabeth. "The ecstatic woman and the grotesque: A new lacanian subject in the work of Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.488603.
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'The 'female ecstatic', according to Elisabeth Roudinesco, emerged in the interwar years as a vision bom from both surrealist artists and : practicing psychoanalysts. Although Roudinesco is describing a masculine, modernist construction that has been critiqued by feminist scholars,I look at how this muse is reconfigured in the work of Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy through their use of the grotesque as an intervention in masculine discourses.
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Durán, Hernández-Mora Gloria. "Dandysmo y contragénero. La artista Dandy de entreguerras: baronesa Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, Djuna Barnes, Florine Stettheimer, Romaine Brooks." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Politècnica de València, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/5953.
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La necesidad de esta tesis surge de indagar la posible presencia de la artista dandy dentro del propio desarrollo del fenómeno llamado dandysmo, aunque surgido como actitud en el siglo XIX ha tenido su propia expansión en el siglo XX, donde especialmente en el periodo de entreguerras se ha encontrado esta actitud estética y vital en cuatro autoras elegidas en este estudio: Baronesa Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927), Djuna Barnes(1892-1982), Florine Stettheimer (1871 - 1944 ) y Romaine Brooks (1874-1970). Se indagará a través de ellas, ya no sólo la posibilidad o no de la mujer dandy, sino la confirmación desde la ortodoxia de los textos originales que el dandysmo desde su fundación, equiparó a hombres y a mujeres, a mujeres no normalizadas por la supuesta optimización burguesa, y se construyó él mismo contra la idea de género. Un contragénero donde el dandy, el artista de la vida moderna, es una mujer en ciertos aspectos, y la dandy, la artista de la vida moderna, será un hombre en ciertos aspectos. Es por ello que las dandys romperán la dicotomía entre los géneros, pero, y además, romperán la distinción entre aquellos objetos que podían, sin duda, ser considerados arte y aquellos que no, pues para ellas, su arte no será otra cosa que su vida, su misma auto-construcción, su aristocrático yo-como-arte. Ese yo-como-arte, prefabricado, decidido y previsto, inaugurará cierto accionismo que leeremos como proto-historia del performance, un género éste cuyos orígenes encontramos en estas vidas conscientemente teatralizadas que inauguran la modernidad. En todas estas acciones, en este hacerse heroico en una sociedad en decadencia, se verá la verdadera actitud de la modernidad. Será pues esta rebeldía metafísica, esta negatividad acumulada primero y desplegada después, la que permitirá incluir a estas dandys dentro de la autonomía moderna, una autonomía que quería cuestionar la "normalidad" burguesa.Durán Hernández-Mora, G. (2009). Dandysmo y contragénero. La artista Dandy de entreguerras: baronesa Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, Djuna Barnes, Florine Stettheimer, Romaine Brooks [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/5953
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Goodspeed-Chadwick, Julie Elaine. "Representations of war and trauma in embodied modernist literature : the identity politics of Amy Lowell, Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein." Virtual Press, 2007. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1364941.
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This study situates the literary works of Amy Lowell, Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein in a genealogy of American modernist war writing by women that disrupts and revises patriarchal war narrative. These authors take ownership of war and war-related trauma as subjects for women writers. Combining the theories of Dominick LaCapra, Judith Butler, Elaine Scarry, and Elizabeth Grosz with close readings of primary texts, I offer feminist analyses that account for trauma and real-world materiality in literary representations of female embodiment in wartime. This framework enables an interdisciplinary discussion that focuses on representations of war and trauma in conjunction with identity politics.I examine Lowell's poetry collection Men, Women and Ghosts (1916), Barnes's novel Nightwood (1936), H.D.'s poem Trilogy (1944-1946), and Stein's novel Mrs. Reynolds (1952). The chapters highlight the progressively feminist and personal ownership of war and trauma embedded in the texts. Lowell and Barnes begin the work of deconstructing gendered binary constructions and inserting women into war narrative, and H.D. and Stein continue this trajectory through cultivation of more pronounced depictions of women and their bodies in war narrative.The strategies are distinct and specific to each author, but there are common characteristics in their literary responses to World War I and World War II. Each author protests war: war is destructive for Lowell, perverse for Barnes, traumatic for H.D., and disruptive for Stein. Additionally, each author renders female bodies as sites of contested identity and as markers of presence in war narrative. The female bodies portrayed are often traumatized and marked by the ravages of war: bodily injury and psychological and emotional distress. H.D. and Stein envision strategies for resolving (if only partially) trauma, but Lowell and Barnes do not.This project recovers alternative war narratives by important American modernist women writers, expands the definition and canon of war literature, contributes new scholarship on works by the selected authors, and constructs an original critical framework. The ramifications of this study are an increased awareness of who was writing about war and the shape that responses to it took in avant-garde literature of the early twentieth century.Department of English
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Dunne, Danny T. "The quest for a feminist unconscious : the covenant of maternal empowerment in Shelley, Barnes, and Hurston : theses." Scholarly Commons, 1993. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/2252.
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I do not purport to give a definitive argument for or against the influences of the unconscious, for the necessary realm of expertise lies within other fields: psychiatry and psychology. However, the application of psychoanalytic literary theory of the unconscious to the lives, words, and characters of selected female authors in order to explore a richer, more meaningful purpose of their art will be the subject of this literary journey. Specifically, the intent will be an analysis of the relation between the manifest content of three classic works of literature to the unconscious intent relative to the author’s biographical perspective, or the psychology of literature.
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Thompson, Heidi M. "Uroboros : visions of the androgyne /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9473.
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Sharp, Kellie Jean. "Convex Children: The Queer Child and Development in Nightwood and the Member of the Wedding." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1277129748.
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Clair, Erin C. "Death becomes her modernism, femininity, and the erotics of death /." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/5973.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007.The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on March 6, 2008) Includes bibliographical references.
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Groff, Tyler Robert. "Entrenched Personalities: World War I, Modernism, and Perceptions of Sexual Identity." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1375987629.
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Jungstrand, Anna. "Det litterära med reportaget : Om litteraritet som journalistisk strategi och etik." Doctoral thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för litteraturvetenskap och idéhistoria, 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-94131.
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This doctoral thesis explores the literarity of reportage, with a focus on the 20th century and modern reportage. The aim is to describe the literary strategies used in modern text-based reportage and how these strategies relate to journalistic standards of credibility and ethics. A primary focus is the question of what the reportage is looking for in the literary, what happens to this literarity when it is used for journalistic purposes, and, in turn, how the literary establishes ethics in the text. By suggesting that a piece of reportage is a journalistic text that simultaneously tells the story about the reporter’s encounter with the event, this dissertation sheds light on possible approaches to the concept of literarity: Subjectivity, narrativity, meta-narrative aspects, the poetic function of language and the performative movements in the text. The ethics of reportage is also to be derived from the encounter, and this thesis implements a concept of ethics in conversations with Emmanuel Levinas and dialogical philosophy. It provides an opportunity to separate ethics from moral, ideological and political dimensions of responsibility in the encounter. This aspect of ethics, where literarity and counter-movement operate beyond the direct intention, is what is needed to understand the reportage genre. The dissertation also includes six longer reportage analyses embodying its results: Djuna Barnes’s, Vagaries Malicieux, Ryszard Kapuściński’s Another Day of Life, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Hanna Krall’s A Tale for Hollywood, Sven Lindqvist’s Kina nu: Vad skulle Mao ha sagt? and Joan Didion’s, Slouching towards Bethlehem.
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Klein, Xenia. "Sorgens Separatism." Thesis, Konstfack, Institutionen för Konst (K), 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:konstfack:diva-6076.
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Jag söker det vackra i det som gör så jävla ont. tvetydigt vackert Jag kallar det för en sorgens separatism. Att bli utestängd från alla andra på grund av sin sorg, för att sedan börja stänga in alla de som av sorgen inte stängts ut. Zarah var en av många som grät en tår och den föll genom staden bort till mitt öga. De som gråter över sorgen, sorgen som är. De gråter i mina ögon. Men när jag väl kommer gråtandes, kommer du då tillåta mig att gråta i ditt? Min konst kanske kan få vara mellanrummet mellan våra tårar, som de kvävda andetagen mitt där i. Det är en sorgens separatisms och jag är osäker på om varken vi sorgsna eller vi sorgliga förstår mer om vad det innebär än om hur det faktiskt känns.
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WOLFE, JUDY LOUISE. "ANTI-PATRIARCHAL STRATEGIES IN THE MAJOR WORKS OF DJUNA BARNES (FEMINIST, DECONSTRUCTIVE)." Thesis, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/1911/15944.
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Djuna Barnes wrote when phallocentric assumptions constituted the unquestioned values of Western culture. Yet in Ryder, Nightwood, and The Antiphon, Barnes challenged and subverted the phallocentric values of the patriarchal society by deconstructing the binary oppositions fundamental to the patriarchy. Western thought is predicated upon binary oppositions in which a primary term is viewed as positive and a secondary term is viewed as negative. In her three major works, Ryder, Nightwood, and The Antiphon, Barnes presents several such sets of opposition, male/female, human/animal, heterosexual/homosexual, and life/death. Barnes inverts the binary oppositions so that the terms can no longer be viewed as positive or negative, but merely as different. Thus Barnes is anti-patriarchal in her deconstruction of these binary oppositions basic to Western culture.
In Ryder and in Nightwood, the most basic oppositions presented are human/animal and male/female. Unlike Western culture which valorizes human consciousness above animal consciousness, Barnes deconstructs this opposition to assert that in giving up animal consciousness for human consciousness mankind has lost something of value. Deconstructing the opposition of male/female in Ryder, Barnes reveals the phallus as an instrument of oppression. In Nightwood, the major characters are homosexual, but their suffering clearly is not the result of their homosexuality. In its failure to condemn homosexuality, Nightwood is inherently anti-patriarchal, for in patriarchal Western culture heterosexuality is obligatory. The Antiphon, too, is anti-patriarchal and treats pairs of opposition deconstructively. At the center of The Antiphon is the story of an attempted paternal rape. Ironically, the values of the patriarchy are voiced by the mother in the play, who demonstrates that victims may adopt the point of view of the oppressor. Abused by father, mother, and brothers, the only daughter of the family is sacrificed as a scapegoat victim. Thus the final dichotomy that Barnes deconstructs is that of life/death, questioning our most basic presupposition that life is preferable to death, for death brings peace to life's tortured victims.
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Wallace, Laura Knowles. "My history, finally invented : Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and its readers." 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/22786.
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In this report, I examine the reception of Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936)
from contemporary reviews in periodicals to twenty-first century online reviews. I am
interested in how the novel has been situated in both historical and personal canons. I
focus on how Nightwood has been read through the lenses of experimental modernism,
lesbian feminism and postmodern queer theory, and how my own readings of it have
changed over the years.text
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Dustin, Lheisa. "Ghost words and invisible giants : H.D. and Djuna Barnes under signs of the imperative." Thesis, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/8164.
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My dissertation examines the correlations between the natural and supernatural, agency and authority, and meaning and language in the work of the modernist American writers H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Djuna Barnes. Using the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, I argue that the different kinds of spectral and otherworldly figures that appear in these works – ghosts, the living dead, divinities, individuals who are also amorphous multiplicities – correlate to the modes of negation of parental imperatives that structure the language-use of their authors. I contrast H.D.‘s and Barnes‘s visions of the relation of language to meaning and the personal to the social using Lacan‘s delineation of the different modes of psychic negation that enable or disable language use: repression, disavowal, and foreclosure. According to this model, H.D.‘s work evidences foreclosure: a mode of thought and language that fails to differentiate words, thoughts, and people from one another. This incapacity endangers the psyche with the hallucinatory return of or haunting by what cannot be symbolized. In contrast, Barnes‘s work suggests disavowal, and her language renders experience in distorted forms. She repudiates power figures and the unspeakable meanings associated with them, but her work portrays the spectral, surreptitious return of these figures and meanings.
Writing that witnesses or stages a return to a state of non-difference between symbol and symbolized, as Barnes‘s and H.D.‘s work does, calls for different interpretative and methodological strategies than those usual in literary criticism. To read such work primarily as symbolic communication is to lose perspective on the structures of thought and language that it grapples with. A perspective that is rigorous and radically different from the works‘ own is necessary to produce readings of it that make symbolic ―sense,‖ though it is unable to fully account for experiences that are not conceivable. To this end, I describe ―disorders,‖ types of thought and language that psychoanalysis implicates in interminable human suffering, without drawing conclusions about the range of experiences that might be concurrent with asymbolic or anti-symbolic thought and writing.Graduate
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Gruenewald, Aleta Frances. "Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Transgender Epistemologies in the Biopolitcal State." Thesis, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/6667.
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This thesis examines why contemporary transgender populations in democratic states fail to see the benefits of social rights legislation. I use Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer to explain how transgender people have become encamped in the margins of the contemporary biopolitical world in such a way as the rule of law does not apply to them. This encampment is especially severe for those who defy our current way of understanding transgender identity. I trace transgender back to its inter-war origins in order to establish how medicalized discourses have created the narrow contemporary definition. I use Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, which details the lives of non-passing inverts in the “night-world” of interwar Europe, to trace an alternate history of transgender subjects who have been excluded from such discourses. Linking Barnes’s characterization of inverted figures to contemporary trans people who do not pass allows for the creation of alternate transgender epistemologies that undermine states of encampment.Graduate
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Radia, Pavlina. ""Nomadic" modernisms, modernist "nomadisms" : (Dis)figuring exile in selected works of Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, and Eva Hoffman." 2004. http://link.library.utoronto.ca/eir/EIRdetail.cfm?Resources__ID=94543&T=F.
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Taylor, Benjamin. "Waxing Ornamental : Reading a Poetics of Excess in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood." Thèse, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/12529.
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Ce mémoire de maîtrise porte sur une poétique de l’excès dans Orlando de Virginia Woolf et Nightwood de Djuna Barnes comme une stratégie combattant la tendance qu’a le modernisme à dévaloriser l’écriture des femmes comme étant trop ornementale. J’expose comment Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, et Wyndham Lewis tentent de récupérer la notion du détail afin d’affirmer une poétique masculin. Je fais appel également aux oeuvres de l’architecte autrichien Adolf Loos qui souligne sa dénonciation de l’ornement comme régressif. Dans Orlando et Nightwood, je considère l’excès associé au corps. Je soutiens que, dans ces textes, les corps dépassent les limites de la représentation moderniste. Je considère aussi comment Orlando et Nightwood font apparaître la narration comme ornement et écrivent excessivement l’histoire et le temps. Pour conclure, je propose une façon de lire l’excès afin de reconceptualiser le potentiel de production de la signification dans des textes modernistes.My thesis explores a poetics of excess in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as a strategy through which the authors combat modernism’s devaluation of women’s writing for being overly ornamental, detailed, and/or artificial. I examine how the critical writings of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis attempt to reclaim the notion of detail for a masculine-oriented poetic project, and I look at how Austrian architect Adolf Loos’s work condemns ornament as backward and regressive. In treating Orlando and Nightwood directly, I consider the novels’ excessive and ornamental construction of bodies and how these bodies exceed the limits of existing modernist paradigms for representation. I also discuss narration as ornamentation in Orlando and Nightwood and how these novels excessively inscribe history and time. My conclusion proposes a practice of reading excess that rethinks this concept and its potential for producing meaning in modernist texts.
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Jenkins, Brad. "Writers & typists: intersections of modernism and sexology." Thesis, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/215.
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This study explores the intersection of Modernism and sexology. To date, most studies of sexology’s influence on literature have focused on the importance of inversion in the lesbian salons of interwar Paris and, specifically, on Radclyffe Hall and her associates. The central question in these studies is whether inversion was ultimately beneficial or detrimental to the larger struggle for sexual equality and gay rights. This is an important question and key elements of the debate are reviewed. Sometimes lost in this discussion, however, is sexology’s influence on the creative process of different Modernist writers. By purporting to explain the origins and function of desire, sexology raised the prospect of engineering response, of literally seducing the reader into new aesthetic experiences. These prospects arise not from a literal application of sexological precepts but from a process of critical revision that transformed sexology without undermining the objectivist pretensions upon which the discourse was founded. The dissertation is directed toward explaining the nature of this exchange and its influence on the work of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes.
Theoretically, the study follows Bruno Latour in rethinking the arts/science divide. It suggests writers were able to occupy seemingly self-contradictory positions—embracing both the objective authority of science and the perspectivism of the arts—by exploiting a disavowed hybridity at the heart of the modern condition. This discursive sleight of hand empowered these writers to reinvent both their own identities and the forms in which they worked. Proceeding more or less chronologically, the study begins by looking at Gertrude Stein’s efforts to incorporate the mechanics of attraction into her writing, guided by the work of Otto Weininger. It next examines Virginia Woolf’s exploration of androgyny with reference to Edward Carpenter’s advocacy on behalf of the “intermediate sex”. Finally, attention shifts to Djuna Barnes and the limits of sexology and other attempts to theorize desire. Ultimately, the goal is not to explain sexual difference or to advocate on behalf of any one position. Instead, the dissertation examines how sexology inspired the Modernist imagination in further challenging artistic conventions.
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Gridneva, Yana. "Přehodnocení zvířete: posthumanistické tendence v (post) moderní beletrii." Master's thesis, 2017. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-267834.
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This thesis posits post-humanism as a philosophy that engages directly with the problem of anthropocentrism and is concerned primarily with the metaphysics of subjectivity. It studies five literary texts (James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Flush, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Brigid Brophy's Hackenfeller's Ape and J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons) that challenge the humanistic or classical subject through critical engagement with what this subject traditionally saw as its antithesis - the animal. These texts contest various fixed assumptions about animality and disrupt the status-quo of the human. Breaking with the tradition that treats animals exclusively as a metaphor for the human, they attempt to see and understand animality outside the framework of anthropocentric suppositions. This project aims to describe the strategies these texts employ to conceptualize animality as well as the methods they apply to delineate its subversive potential and to disrupt the human- animal binary. Its theoretical framework combines the work of thinkers belonging to the new but thriving field of Animal Studies with the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It is this project's great ambition to contribute towards the development of new post- humanist ethics defined by its...