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.

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

While the power dynamics between theatre critics and artists are inevitably imbalanced, as the written word reaches a wider audience and lives much longer than does performance, for feminist artists, the stakes in this relationship are heightened due to the disjunction in identity and ideology that often separates them from mainstream reviewers. This study exposes the gendered nature of theatre criticism, examining the dialogue about feminist theatre in which critics, audiences, and artists are engaged, and identifying its consequences beyond the box office. Case studies are drawn from Nightwood Theatre (1979-present) in Toronto and the Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes (TEF) (1979-1987) in Montreal as well as the work of the TEF’s co-founder Pol Pelletier before 1979 and after 1987 in order to examine key issues in the critical reception of feminist theatre in Canada, including: censorship, the relationship between art and politics, translation, and how artists speak back to their critics. This dissertation argues that the standards employed by mainstream reviewers, while most often not intentionally discriminatory against women, run counter to the central qualities of much feminist theatre. Reviewers’ tendency to separate text and spectacle and their consistent reification of universality and objectivity as critical ideals work in contradistinction to feminist theatre, which has historically placed greater emphasis on performance over written text and foregrounded the particularized nature of identity and experience. Drawing extensively on archival materials and applying a materialist feminist framework to the study of theatre criticism, this dissertation examines the history of feminist theatre and performance in Canada from a different perspective than it has previously been studied and suggests new ways to understand the relationship between critics, artists, and audiences. Through its case studies emerge several practical suggestions about responsible and ethical critical writing that can be applied beyond the scope of feminist theatre.

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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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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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

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 / 0615 / 0298 / 0733 / agruenew@uvic.ca

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