Unit:
Speciality Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century Anglophone Literature and CultureLibrary of the School of Philosophy
Supervisors info:
Σταματίνα Δημακοπούλου, Επίκουρη Καθηγήτρια τμήματος Αγγλικής Γλώσσας και Φιλολογίας, Τομέα Λογοτεχνίας και Πολιτισμού, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Άννα Δεσποτοπούλου, Καθηγήτρια τμήματος Αγγλικής Γλώσσας και Φιλολογίας, Τομέα Λογοτεχνίας και Πολιτισμού, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Ευτέρπη Μήτση, Καθηγήτρια τμήματος Αγγλικής Γλώσσας και Φιλολογίας, Τομέα Λογοτεχνίας και Πολιτισμού, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Original Title:
De-Centering the Margins: Disintegration and Liberation in the Later Works of Mina Loy, Jean Rhys and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Translated title:
De-Centering the Margins: Disintegration and Liberation in the Later Works of Mina Loy, Jean Rhys and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Summary:
The purpose of this dissertation is to trace a timeline of female marginalization from the middle of the twentieth century backwards, within the Anglo-American modernist and the New York avant-garde scene. Focusing on the work of Mina Loy, Jean Rhys and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven during the later years of their lives and careers, my aim is to examine the lonely female figure of the twentieth century depicted in their work, who is alienated because of her disintegrating youth. Loy’s later poetry, as well as Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939) depict a failed vision of human experience that cannot be reclaimed, establishing the binary oppositions of gender and aging within a consumerist culture. Even though Elsa’s later work also reflects on such themes, her sound poetry reconstructs an embodied vision of modernity by unsettling the effects of capitalism on the corporeal self. Concluding my analysis with the “Mother of Dada,” I argue that Elsa’s performative poetry liberates Mina Loy’s female subjectivity, which is striving to preserve a youthful appearance, and simultaneously transforms Jean Rhys’s heroine into a sexually liberated human being, who is no longer constrained by the beauty standards of an industrialized modernity.
Main subject category:
Language – Literature
Keywords:
Mina Loy, Jean Rhys, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, disintegration, vulnerability, aging, industrialized modernity, liberation, marginalization
