Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Alumna, English Ph.D. Program
New York University, French Studies
Université Paris Diderot, Institut d'Etudes Anglophones
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Jane Marcus
Catherine Bernard |
About
Recent PhD graduate as of May 2011; degree completed in co-tutelle at the CUNY Graduate Center and the Université de Paris VII.
Adjunct professor at NYU in Paris.
In my dissertation, “The Bend Back: Modernity, Sensation, Vision in Bowen, Rhys, Woolf, and Lehmann,” I take as my point of departure the idea that the shifts in women’s social roles which occurred after the Great War and throughout the 1920s coincided with, and indeed made possible, formal shifts in women’s writing. A change in social perspective occasions a change in literary perspective. However, these shifts did not result in an unhinged feeling of freedom and liberation for women. On the contrary, these writers attest to a double bind of propriety and permissiveness, of freedom and constraint, that comes through in their texts on a formal, thematic, and affective level. The late modernist novels I examine testify to the fact that in order to “rise to the occasion,” as Elizabeth Bowen describes the central challenge of modern life, one must be attuned to what is expected of one, to how one is viewed, to how one is judged, to how one feels, how one is to love, how one is to live. The essential function of perception, according to Merleau-Ponty, is “to lay the foundations of, or inaugurate, knowledge” (19). Through readings of the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia Woolf, I argue that the senses become a tool for understanding how to navigate this constantly shifting social context. Each chapter concentrates on a way in which the authors considered articulate the tensions between the self and society through an attentive activation of the physical as well as knowledge-based senses. A major narrative strategy adopted by these writers, I argue, is the bend back-- rather than proceeding teleologically, their texts bend backward in a therapeutic attempt to revalue the present, or to understand how it came to be so, in a larger attempt to make sense of their moment and their role within it.
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