The Aesthetics of Perversion: Between Dreaming and Waking in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

• 영문명: The Aesthetics of Perversion: Between Dreaming and Waking in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
• 발행기관: 한국아메리카학회
• 저자명: Joewon Yoon
• 간행물 정보: 『미국학논집』제49집 1호, 243~269쪽, 전체 27쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 기타인문학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2017.05.30

영문 초록

This essay examines the stylistic and political ramifications of the radical aesthetics of Nightwood, focusing on Barnes’s strategic deployment of inversion and abjection. Nightwood makes specific references to sexual inverts and the third sex, but its world encompasses more than sexually marginalized beings. It is also made up of inverted spaces, where conventional signification of spatiality—especially the home and the church—is radically overturned and critiqued. By shuffling meanings ordinarily attached to corporeality and spatiality, Nightwood redefines reality itself; by tracing the work of desire that reveals the abjection of desiring beings, it also redefines subjectivity as that which is already marked with perversion. Nightwood also uses two women’s same-sex relationship as a metonymic instance figuring desire in general. In that sense, the use Nightwood makes of inversion liberates same-sex desire from the pigeonhole of a particular pathology. This is another significant achievement of Nightwood that I find in its stylistic and political appropriation of the sexological discourse in currency in the early twentieth century.

목차

1. Perverted Narrative: “with desires utterly divergent from his own”

2. Peculiar, Abject Bodies: “the pageantry of the circus and the theatre”

3. Voicing the Unvoiced: “Watchman, What of the Night?”

4. The Aesthetics of Perversion:

“the night does something to a person’s identity”

키워드

Djuna Barnes Nightwood perversion inversion same-sex attraction desire subjectivity abjection