The weight of words: Body as text in H.D.'s (late) work.
Item
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Title
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The weight of words: Body as text in H.D.'s (late) work.
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Identifier
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AAI9986370
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identifier
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9986370
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Creator
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Regney, Gabrielle Anne.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Wayne Koestenbaum
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Date
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2000
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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, American | Language, General
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Abstract
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Since the late 1970s, much has been done to excavate the work of H.D. Once constructed as the Imagiste par excellence, she now speaks, as if from the grave, as Feminist, Lesbian, Goddess, mother, madwoman, and witch. This dissertation investigates these positions of articulation as they coincide with Julia Kristeva's figure of the chora: maternal space holding totality of primal drives. For Kristeva, semiotic discourse (expressions issued from the chora) is evident in such forms as wordplay, interruption, and insistent rhythms. H.D. can be more fully read through a holistic, especially aural, engagement with the text---body to body---keeping an car to the ground and the space between the fines.;The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate how the individual and collective female body means, in H.D.'s "late" work. The analysis uses feminist models of subjectivity against the phallogocentric traditions of modernism and psychoanalytic theory; it further 'queers' H.D. by centralizing homoerotic desire. The results of such a reading demonstrate that the self created by H.D.'s corporeal poetics both threatens and is threatened by the symbolic (the law of the Father).;This study begins at the end, with some posthumous (and largely ignored) publications. First, Notes on Thought and Vision and the Wise Sappho , the critical foundation of her career, establishes the proper framework for reading the bodywriting of H.D.'s body of work. Then, the autobiographical, homoerotic novels demonstrate the dramatic life experiences that formed her early writing and led to a new aesthetics. Ultimately, the restrictions of prose gave way to epic poetry. The chapter on Trilogy addresses madness; the chapter on Helen focuses on Goddess-centered vision, and the chapter on Hermetic Definition continues the discussion of the eroticized Mother. Witnessing these myriad semiotic articulations as viable purges some of the biases from Kristeva's labeling of them as precultural.;Reading H.D.'s corporeal poetics heals the mind-body split and provides a healing and empowering alternative to the mainstream, Lacanian positioning of the female as inaccessible object. The work is late, ironically, because it has been waiting for readers eager and able to receive its subaltern modes.
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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.
