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Barnes_Djuna_Fox
Barnes_Djuna_Fox
ABSTRACT (ENGLISH)
Keywords: Djuna Barnes / The Book of Repulsive Women / hybridity / sexual difference / minor literature / feminist
theory In a 1919 interview with Djuna Barnes, her publisher, Guido Bruno, asserts, "No one can deny that all your
efforts are picturesque, unusual, even beautiful in their ugliness. In spite of the current critical attention to Barnes
and the various extant editions of The Book of Repulsive Women, this text has yet to garner the scholarly
consideration it deserves.1 Because the poems are incongruous with the dominant aesthetics of the period, failing to
adhere to the poetic trends of Pound and H.D.'s imagism, William Carlos Williams's free verse, or T. S. Eliot's
fragmented and densely allusive poetic style, they tend to be ignored or disparaged. [...]with the exception of recent
work by Daniela Caselli, Melissa Jane Hardie, Mary E. Galvin, Irene Martyniuk, and Mary I. Unger, contemporary
scholarship on Barnes, including new monographs, only mentions The Book of Repulsive Women in passing, if at
all. Barnes's work, however, appropriates and redeploys decadent tropes as a way to expose and challenge this
misogyny. [...]the chapbook moves among various artistic forms and historically situated aesthetic registers, and
ought to be reassessed in relation to Barnes's genre-bending oeuvre. In so doing, she critiques representations of
women propagated by hegemonic philosophical and literary projects that construct women in terms of lack and
repulsion, but she also offers alternative models of gender and sexuality that move beyond binary thinking. [...]I
advocate for the recuperation of...
FULL TEXT
Headnote
Abstract
This article argues that Djuna Barnes's The Book of Repulsive Women challenges dominant representations of
female sexuality by transvaluing perversity and endorsing a form of radical alterity. In this text, as in much of her
oeuvre, Barnes uses hybridity as a formal and representational strategy for expressing resistance to generic
conventions and gendered norms. This recuperative reading of Barnes's marginalized chapbook demonstrates how
the text creates physical and conceptual spaces for her queer subjects and offers non-binary models of gender and
sexuality. Furthermore, Barnes's text allows us to think more concretely about the politics of form and to account
more tangibly for gender within Deleuze and Guattari's conception of "minor literature."
Keywords: Djuna Barnes / The Book of Repulsive Women / hybridity / sexual difference / minor literature / feminist
theory
In a 1919 interview with Djuna Barnes, her publisher, Guido Bruno, asserts, "No one can deny that all your efforts
are picturesque, unusual, even beautiful in their ugliness. No one denies you have talent. But why such morbidity?"
(386). Barnes replies, "This life I write and draw and portray is life as it is, and therefore you call it morbid."
Bruno's interview with Barnes highlights her "unusual" style and the logic of repulsion that governs her first
chapbook, The Book of Repulsive Women, but it also epitomizes the reductive critical attempts to categorize
Barnes's early work. Bruno insists on positioning Barnes's artistic output in terms of decadent aesthetics, a claim he
reinforces by comparing the visual elements of her 1919 play, Three from the Earth, to Aubrey Beardsley's drawings
DETAILS
Literature indexing term: Author: Aldington, Richard, 1892-1962; Author's work: Images (1910-1915); Author:
Deleuze, Gilles; Author: Stein, Gertrude, 1874-1946; Author: Barnes, Djuna.
Subject: Feminism ; Keywords ; Poetry ; Women ; Sex differences ;
Rhetorical figures ; Literature ; Truth ; Sexuality ; Modernity
; Male gaze ; Literary canon ; Anthropocentrism ; British &Irish
literature ; English literature
People: Deleuze, Gilles; Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946); Barnes, Djuna; Aldington, Richard
(1892-1962)
Volume: 12
Pages: N_A
ISSN: 15519309
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