Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction Broken Hearts and Bleeding Wounds – Traumatic Modernism?
- 1 ‘The Excellent Arrangement of Catastrophe’: Witnessing and Performance in The Antiphon
- 2 Djuna Barnes Beside Herself: Mixed Feelings, Sentimental Modernism and Ryder
- 3 ‘The Infected Carrier of the Past’: Nightwood, Shame and Modernism
- 4 ‘That Magic Reiteration’: Ladies Almanack and Happiness
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction - Broken Hearts and Bleeding Wounds – Traumatic Modernism?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction Broken Hearts and Bleeding Wounds – Traumatic Modernism?
- 1 ‘The Excellent Arrangement of Catastrophe’: Witnessing and Performance in The Antiphon
- 2 Djuna Barnes Beside Herself: Mixed Feelings, Sentimental Modernism and Ryder
- 3 ‘The Infected Carrier of the Past’: Nightwood, Shame and Modernism
- 4 ‘That Magic Reiteration’: Ladies Almanack and Happiness
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
And what in the world, dear Edwin could I do for Bollingen? As I told Eliot, I'm not a ‘writer’; once in every twenty years or so, the wound bleeds, that's all. (Djuna Barnes to Edwin Muir, 26 October 1957)
‘Oh,’ [O'Connor] cried. ‘A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart!’ (Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, 139)
The grande-dameish tone of Djuna Barnes's letter to Edwin Muir, in which she emphatically situates her ‘bleeding’ modernism outside the institutional body of the Bollingen Foundation, is typical of her later correspondence. A glamorous yet cantankerous representative of Left-Bank expatriate life, the Djuna Barnes one encounters in modernist life-writing has rather a lot in common with Nightwood's melancholic, cross-dressing, unlicensed gynaecologist Dr Matthew O'Connor. Like her doctor, Barnes deploys her melodrama with camp flourish. And equally, both the biographical Barnes and her literary oeuvre support O'Connor's somatic conception of feeling, his deliberate conjunction of psychic pain and embodied experience. Barnes's writing forces us to remember that reading engages the body: in both quotations she invites us to smile with delight and gasp with horror. Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism argues that these mixed feelings are central to Barnes's aesthetically and politically challenging oeuvre. In works that allow us to further comprehend the variousness of the modernist project, Djuna Barnes describes how affects circulate between bodies – and between texts and bodies – in ways at once generative and disruptive.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism , pp. 1 - 35Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2012