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Dazzling Estrangement: Modernism, Queer Ekphrasis, and the Spatial Form of Nightwood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Brian Glavey
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Abstract

The reputation of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood as a work of “marginal” modernism is complicated by its affinities with the aesthetics of high modernism, a fact signaled by its role as the inspiration of Joseph Frank's theory of spatial form. At once emblematic and eccentric, the novel is devoted to both recognition and obscurity. Nightwood enacts this paradox through a strategy of queer ekphrasis that aestheticizes moments of loss, giving aesthetic form to experiences of stigma in order to “dazzle” them. Attending to Barnes's spatial form will forward debates about modernism and queer theory, suggesting a more useful vocabulary for both: an account of the aesthetic that is neither wholly subversive nor wholly conservative and a nuanced account of queerness that does not subscribe to either total negation or total affirmation.

Type
Cluster on Queer Modernism
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 3 , May 2009 , pp. 749 - 763
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

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