Women and the avant-garde: Sexual difference in discourse and art, 1900--1950.

Abstract

This study seeks to understand the critical influences shaping the literary and artistic exchanges between women and the modernist avant-garde. It analyzes texts disclosing expressions of gender and sexual difference produced by a variety of women writers and artists involved in or influenced by Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. These analyses are interdisciplinary in nature, incorporating literature, art, literary and social theory, psychology, and philosophy. Each chapter situates a major avant-garde concept or artistic method within an unfolding analysis describing the ways that women writers and artists adapt, alter, or negotiate these concepts or methods. I argue that the variations in avant-garde ideas present in the work of Mina Loy, Wanda Wulz, H.D., Hannah Hoch, Djuna Barnes, Claude Cahun, Nancy Cunard, and Leonora Carrington shows that these women were not only contributing to the modernist avant-garde, but also that these contributions often resisted the sexist undertones that often characterized the avant-garde movements of this period. The findings of this research project suggest that many of the American and British expatriate women writers who spent time in Paris during the period of 1900--1950 were influenced by the visual culture and experimentalism of the European avant-garde in ways that are not discussed in traditional studies of literary modernism. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)