Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism
£19.99
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About this book
Explores the dynamic connections between the affective body and Djuna Barnes's textual corpus
- Presents a new theory of modernist intertextuality
- Based on original archival research conducted at Barnes's archives at the University of Maryland
- Includes the first reappraisal of the textual history of The Antiphon for two decades
- Unseats Roland Barthes's dominant ideas about textual pleasure and theory's continued over-valuation of the model of jouissance
Julie Taylor uses the writings of the American novelist, poet, dramatist, artist and journalist Djuna Barnes to form the basis of a series of disruptive questions about modernist aesthetics and the politics of reading.
- How do we reconcile Djuna Barnes's biographical writing with her Modernist commitment to impersonality?
- How do we honour the complexities of traumatic experience without pathologising the subject?
- How might we differently imagine the relationship between Modernism and literary history?
- Should we take on faith the Modernist repudiation of emotion?
- Why do we find it so difficult to talk about the pleasures of reading?
The five chapters reconsider modernist intertextuality, affect and subjectivity to produce a series of lively and compelling readings of the major works of the period's most 'famous unknown'.
Reviews
A thorough and engaged analysis of the entirety of Barnes' oeuvre and the trajectory of her long writing career.
Julie Taylor offers a sophisticated, revisionary interpretation of Djuna Barnes' major writings and, at the same time, a substantial intervention into the theory of modernism and modernist-oriented literary criticism more generally.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements; List of Illustrations; Introduction, Broken Hearts and Bleeding Wounds: Traumatic Modernism?; 1. 'The excellent arrangement of catastrophe': Witnessing and Performance in The Antiphon; 2. Djuna Barnes Beside Herself: Mixed Feelings, Sentimental Modernism, and Ryder; 3. 'The infected carrier of the past': Nightwood, Shame, and Modernism; 4. 'That magic reiteration': Ladies Almanack and Happiness; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.