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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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.

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 / 2019-08-31 / 0298 / 0591

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.

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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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...

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.

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.