Like the products of the "sea-change" described in Ariel's song
in The Tempest, modernist writing is "rich and strange." Its
greatness lies in its density and its dislocations, which have
until now been viewed as a repudiation of and an alternative to the
cultural implications of turn-of-the-century political radicalism.
Marianne DeKoven argues powerfully to the contrary, maintaining
that modernist form evolved precisely as a means of representing
the terrifying appeal of movements such as socialism and feminism.
Organized around pairs and groups of female-and male-signed texts,
the book reveals the gender-inflected ambivalence of modernist
writers. Male modernists, desiring utter change, nevertheless
feared the loss of hegemony it might entail, while female
modernists feared punishment for desiring such change. With water
imagery as a focus throughout, DeKoven provides extensive new
readings of canonical modernist texts and of works in the feminist
and African-American canons not previously considered modernist.
Building on insights of Luce Irigaray, Klaus Theweleit, and Jacques
Derrida, she finds in modernism a paradigm of unresolved
contradiction that enacts in the realm of form an alternative to
patriarchal gender relations.
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