In the Colonies is a work of fiction. It tells the story of a young German harpist, C––, who is seduced into a life of luxury by a venal American, Sansone. She is invited to spend a year at his artists’ colony, where she works on composing a transcendent work of music and, in the process, realizes that she has lost sight of the material realities around her. Ultimately, she comes to realize that her single-minded pursuit of an ideal Beauty has driven her away from the very ideals she aspired to in the first place.

“Play, play every day, play and play and play away...” So der Beginn des Textes von Gertrude Stein, ein Text, der selbst schon ein musikalisches Gebilde ist, denn er lebt vom Klang des Wortes „play“ und von permanent repetierten play-Phrasen. Schon nach kurzer Zeit wird klar, dass es kein leichtes Spiel, dafür ein unermüdliches, unausweichliches wird. Die Komposition „Play“ folgt der Textstruktur bis in entfernteste Winkel und spielt damit. Die Uraufführung fand am 2002 in der ehemaligen „Tangofabrik“ in Leipzig statt. Es spielte das Trio „Musiké me tris“: Mareike Schellenberger (Mezzosopran), Dietmar Schaffer (Violine), Eckehard Schubert (Klavier). Anja-Christin Winkler führte Regie.

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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.

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.

This thesis addresses the literary representation of food in the period from 1900 through 1945 in the work of Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. Taking up nineteenth-century fascinations with sensual and aesthetic taste, these authors explore the implications of food preparation and consumption in Britain, America and France. They use representations of everyday culinary practices as a way to examine articulations of anxiety about the state of civilization, a fear that is amplified and altered by both World Wars. The thesis approaches the question of the significance of food to literary modernism in two ways. The first is a theoretical analysis of modernist ways of thinking about the dialectic between the concepts of civilization and barbarism. The second is grounded in material history, establishing the contexts and conditions of food culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on sociological thinking from Norbert Elias's conception of the civilizing process and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of distinction, and using a combined methodology of close reading, biographical and historical analysis, I show that food acts as a lens for these authors' ideas about civil society and modernity. My original contribution to knowledge is threefold. The first is my interpretation of 'culinary Impressionism' as an extension and repositioning of current scholarly thinking about Ford's literary Impressionism. The second is my reading of Stein's and Toklas's jointly-authored cookbook draft as evidence of their collaboration. This forms the crux of my argument about Stein adapting domestic culinary techniques into her other writing. The third is in my chapter on Virginia Woolf. My original archival research shows that in A Room of One's Own Woolf's representation of the financial and culinary difference between men's and women's dining in colleges at the University of Cambridge is justified and the material inequality was in fact worse than previously understood. I argue that the disparity in institutional food intensifies Woolf's later reimagining of the term 'civilization' in Three Guineas. While drawing on the work of modernist studies scholars on modernism and the everyday, civilization, and food, my project is unique in demonstrating that food reflects modernist conceptions of civilization and barbarism. My thesis contributes to the understanding of transatlantic aesthetics and gendered productions of modernism by illuminating the centrality of agriculture, cookery, domestic work and institutional dining to modernist authors.

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Studies of women’s experimental narrative in the twentieth century have often been fixed to political interests in the recovery of women’s artistic practices for inclusion in the canons of literary modernism and formal postmodernism. Concurrent trends in philosophy and critical theory, however, propose the interrogation of the limits of subjectivity itself, suggesting that the most provocative assertions about human experience eschew the very categorical delimitations, like gender, on which such recovery projects depend. This dissertation traces the literary investments of women, particularly queer women, whose experiments in life-writing reconfigure the boundaries of human subjects without relinquishing claims to the material or political conditions that shape their lives. “Rough Text” examines writing that queers or complicates autobiography by featuring self-referential protagonists whose lives illustrate the explosive consequences of both gender and genre manipulation. Writing themselves by unfastening themselves textually, temporally, and spatially, these authors do a liberating violence to their own coherence that shakes, and then rethinks, the grounds of their ontologies in ways that offer alternatives to the “psychological squalor” Fredric Jameson describes as the postmodern condition.