14. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936)

Author(s):  
MaryAnn Snyder-Körber
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.


1984 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 107
Author(s):  
Kathleen Chase ◽  
Andrew Field ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Douglos Messerli
Keyword(s):  

2011 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Goodby
Keyword(s):  

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-177
Author(s):  
Miklavž Komelj
Keyword(s):  

Članek poskuša ob nekaterih pesniških zapuščinah dvajsetega stoletja spregovoriti o tisti funkciji rokopisne pisave, v kateri »manus propria« postaja »manus aliena«. S pojavom pisalnega stroja rokopisna pisava ni izgubila svojega pomena, ampak se je pokazala v novi funkciji, ki ni zvedljiva na manualnost, ampak naredi vidne psihične avtomatizme. V članku je posebna pozornost namenjena avtomatski pisavi pri nadrealistih in Fernandu Pessoi. Obenem je konceptualizirana funkcija neberljivosti, ki omogoča, da v območju zapisa vztraja nekaj, kar na ravni besednega pomena ni moglo doseči artikulacije. Če so nadrealisti od avtomatske pisave sprva pričakovali možnost osvoboditve od vezi simbolnega zakona, nas Djuna Barnes v svoji drami Antifona opozori, kako nas roka, ki jo začne od znotraj voditi neka tuja sila, postavi ravno v presečišče vseh napetosti simbolnega. Zadnji del članka je posvečen pozni pesniški zapuščini Djune Barnes, v kateri prav skrajna (a nikoli dokončna) rokopisna elaboracija natipkanih strani tekst prestavlja v nov način obstajanja, ki se upira berljivosti in transkripciji, obenem pa izničuje opozicijo med prisotnostjo in odsotnostjo, na kateri temelji logika označevalca.


Author(s):  
Melanie Micir

This chapter theorizes biographical failure, such as what happens when it feels impossible to finish telling a life story. It reads two incomplete biographical projects in the context of what Jack Halberstam has called the “queer art of failure”: the recognition and reframing of failure as one possible form of the deliberate subversion of heteronormative metrics of success. Djuna Barnes worked for decades to turn the attempted autobiography of her Dadaist friend, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, into a publishable biography. Hope Mirrlees compiled a series of half-done drafts, notes, and outlines toward the biography of her late mentor, friend, and intimate companion, the celebrated Cambridge classicist Jane Ellen Harrison. Though their projects were very different, neither Barnes nor Mirrlees would finish their biographies or consent to let anyone else take over their projects. The chapter reframes the discourse of failure surrounding both projects and suggests that these so-called failures represent acts of resistance to the normalizing pull of typical biographical narratives.


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