Modernist Wastes Recovery, Re-Use and the Autobiographic in Elsa Von-Freytag-Lorighoven and Djuna Barnes : Recovery,Re-Use and the Autobiographic in Elsa Von-Freytag-Lorighoven and Djuna Barnes

"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."-- Provided by publisher Cover Contents List of figures Editorial preface to historicizing modernism Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction: Textual mess and modernism’s gendered wastes i. Modernism and Barnesean wastes ii. What is waste? Bodies, cities, texts 1 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 the New York Dada mecanamorphic portraits iv. ‘Not me. Not that’: The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and the grotesque protrusions of modernism’s marginalia 2 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 3 ‘Not dead’: Djuna Barnes’s mature autobiographic poetics i. ‘This generations 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 4 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 Coda: Modernism recovered Notes Bibliography Index