"Nomadic" modernisms, modernist "nomadisms"
Subtitle: (Dis)figuring exile in selected works of Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, and Eva Hoffman.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 276
Description: Most recent revisionist studies of modernist and contemporary women's writing about exile deploy nomadism, migrancy, and travel as important vehicles for achieving a cross-culturally negotiated, feminist identity. Their contention is that the potential dangers inherent in nomadism and exilic displacement as well as the resulting in-betweenness are, nonetheless, important, if not crucial and justifiable means towards intellectual, spiritual, and artistic development. Viewed in this light, women writers' figurations of home and exile are interpreted as complementary or surrogate locations where fixed national and cultural identities are rendered fluid or completely eradicated. This thesis argues that modernist and contemporary women's narratives about exilic displacement hesitate to erase the line between exile and home just as they do not always justify the consequences of radical dislocation as constructive. Through a close reading of narratives by modernist women writers, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, and Jane Bowles, and a contemporary writer, the essayist, and critic, Eva Hoffman, this thesis traces the ways in which these women writers (dis)figure various exilic and nomadic visions. It argues that the refrains of exile inscribed in their narratives problematize the tempting alternative of seeking a sense of self-locatedness in and through multiple re- and dis-locations, physical or figurative. In their work, their characters' exilic displacement is mostly aligned with drastic socio-cultural paradigm shifts that not only impact their sense of self and body, but also contribute to their psychological, cultural, or linguistic nomadisms that are not always productive. Viewing specific historical and socio-cultural events (for example, literary expatriate movements, WWI, WWII, and migration waves) as necessary yet displaced faces/phases of their characters' psychological and bodily topographies, these women writers' narratives consequently question the potential of the autobiographical genre to function as a textual home in which the exile's cultural, psychological, and bodily ruins may be housed.
Notes: Adviser:  Julian Patrick.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-10, Section: A, page: 3794.