The bed and the battlefield: Gender, sex and nation in the trans-modernist novel.
Item
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Title
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The bed and the battlefield: Gender, sex and nation in the trans-modernist novel.
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Identifier
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AAI3288751
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identifier
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3288751
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Creator
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Camarasana, Linda.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Jane Marcus
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Modern | Literature, English | Literature, American | Literature, Caribbean
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Abstract
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This dissertation explores the narrative juxtaposition of failed heroics and queered erotics in the fiction of four writers from the early twentieth century: Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys and Claude McKay. Their works are read in the context of nationalist discourses of colonialism and imperialism, and in particular the way national belonging is articulated through sexuality. The concept of trans-modernism builds on recent scholarship in queer studies, postcolonial theory, critical race and diaspora studies and helps identify modernist fiction which crosses national boundaries while it also opens up queer narrative space.;The anti-nationalist politics of Virginia Woolf's final novel, Between the Acts, becomes apparent by focusing on a seemingly minor and multiply outcast character, Miss LaTrobe. By giving LaTrobe a central role in the novel, Woolf reveals the exclusions inherent in the ideology of nationalism and posits the lesbian artist as modernist hero.;The image of the encounter between the bed and the battlefield, between the plot of desire and the tale of the imperial hero, comes from a scene from Djuna Barnes's short story "Cassation," in which the homoerotic trajectory of the plot is unexpectedly interrupted by a description of a war painting. Barnes's novel Nightwood makes a similar juxtaposition; against the backdrop of the collapse of the Hapsburg and Romanov empires, her characters move in erotic uncertainty between various settings.;Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight tells the story of exiles trying to navigate their way around Europe between the wars. The 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques Appliques a la Vie Moderne serves as the setting for Rhys's novel. The triumphant nationalism of the Paris World's Fair provides an ironic a counterpoint to the struggles for belonging and economic survival faced by her characters.;The novels of Jamaican-born colonial exile Claude McKay can be read as a tetralogy framed by an epic quest for home for diasporic Africans. McKay's last two novels, Romance in Marseilles and Banana Bottom, are revisionist romances that complete McKay's quest--not for an unattainable home, but rather to reveal the fictions embedded in cultural assertions of a national homeland.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
