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List of contents
Series Editor Preface
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
INTRODUCTION:
Textual Mess and Modernism’s Gendered Wastes
i. Modernism and Barnesean Waste
ii. What is Waste? Cities, Bodies, Texts
CHAPTER ONE:
Stunning Subjects and Disruptive Body Practices
i. Marginality and Modernity: Critical Histories of Exclusion and the Case of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
ii. Gods, Mutts and Readymades: ‘America’s Comfort - Sanitation!’
iii. Calculated Containment: New Women and New York Dada’s Mecanamorphic Portaits
iv. Not Me, Not That: Baroness Elsa and the Grotesque Protrusions of Modernism’s Marginalia
CHAPTER TWO:
Art Dazzle: Modelling, Performance and the Baroness’s Self-Representational Practices
i. Self-Representational Practices, Collage and the Baroness’s Dada Portraits
ii. Making Mischief, or Looking Through a Glass Dynamically
iii. Chimera in the Croquis Class: Spectacle, Performance and the Baroness’s Body-Work
iv. Übermarionettes and Living Statues
CHAPTER THREE:
‘Not Dead’: Djuna Barnes’s Mature Auto/biographic Poetics
i. ‘This Generation’s Vulgarity’: Djuna Barnes and the Biographic Impulse
ii. Textual Waste and the Structural Patterns of Djuna Barnes’s Re-Made Modernism
iii. Circulation in the Theme: Repetition, Refrain and Variation Across the Patchin Place Cycles
iv. CHAPTER FOUR:
Troubling Structures: Inner Time and the ‘Baroness Elsa’ Manuscript
i. The Baroness’s Interruptive Poetics
ii. Cutting, Stitching, Weaving: Ida-Marie’s ‘strange handiwork’
iii. Alexis Carrel and Nightwood’s Troubling Structures
iv. Denying the Called Response: Mothers, Daughters and The Antiphon
CONCLUSION:
Modernism Recovered
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
About the author
Caroline Knighton is an Independent Scholar and writer based in London. She formerly taught and convened courses at Birkbeck, University of London, UK.
Summary
Modernist Wastes is a profound new critical reflection on the ways in which women writers and artists have been discarded and recovered in established definitions of modernism. Exploring the collaborative auto/biographical writings of Djuna Barnes and the artist, poetic and Dada performer Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Caroline Knighton reveals how these very processes of discarding, recovery and re-use can open up new ways of understanding a distinctively female modernist artistic practice.
Illustrated throughout with artworks, original letters and manuscript facsimiles, the book draws on new archival discoveries to place the feminist recovery of neglected female voices at the heart of our understanding of modernist and avant-garde literary culture.
Foreword
Draws on new archival discoveries to explore waste, recovery and re-use in the collaborative auto/biographical writings of Djuna Barnes and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
