© Columbia University Press
Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism
March, 2012
Cloth, 240 pages, 6
ISBN: 978-0-7486-4675-3
Edinburgh University Press
$105.00
The writings of the American novelist, poet, dramatist, artist and journalist Djuna Barnes form the basis of a series of disruptive questions about modernist aesthetics and the politics of reading.
• How do we reconcile Djuna Barnes' 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'.
Key features:
• Presents a new theory of modernist intertextuality
• Based on original archival research conducted at Barnes' archives at the University of Maryland
• Includes the first reappraisal of the textual history of The Antiphon for two decades
• Unseats Roland Barthes' dominant ideas about textual pleasure and theory's continued over-valuation of the model of jouissance.