Djuna Barnes and Theology: Melancholy, Body, Theodicy

ISBN-13: 9781350256026 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 216 str.

Zhao Ng

Opis

Modernism, religion, and queer bodies come together in this study of Djuna Barnes's writings and art. Examining the role of Barnes’s theological imagination in relation to a phenomenology of suffering, joy, and sexed embodiment, this book unfolds an intricate synthesis of theology, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory to interrogate how queerness informs her art. Providing an original contribution to religious and literary theory, Ng develops a neo-ontological account of melancholy in relation to the myth of the Fall and provides a novel framework for understanding comedy and tragedy in relation to the question of theodicy. Presented in light of a large body of new archival evidence, Barnes’s works are also examined for the first time in relation to a wide range of intertextual and intermedial encounters, including the medieval mysticism of Marguerite Porete, Stravinsky’s music, 16th- and 18th-century engravings by Albrecht Dürer and Joseph Ottinger, and French and Russian literature from Baudelaire and Lautréamont to Proust and Dostoevsky.

Spis treści

Preface: Theology and the Queer Body Introduction: A Dialectic of Melancholy and Theodicy 1Melancholy and the Fall 2Comedy I: Ladies Almanack and The Lesbian Sensorium 3Comedy II: Ryder, Rape, and Recurrence 4Tragedy I: Nightwood and the Eschatological Body 5Tragedy II: The Antiphon and the Refusal of History Conclusion: Life or Death Bibliography