EXCERPT All the years I knew Carolyn Heilbrun, beginning in graduate school in 1984, I never heard her utter a single conventional sentiment. Even her more conservative views were unconventional, as though she had formulated them begrudgingly for pragmatic rather than prescriptive reasons. This meant, of...
ABSTRACT Despite its notorious sexual politics, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood gained considerable literary respectability when T. S. Eliot endorsed the first American edition with his Introduction. The presiding dean of Modernist letters at Faber and Faber in London, Eliot could distinguish even obscure writers with a single...
ABSTRACT With the persistence of repetition compulsion, Modernists define their movement vis- à-vis the classic Freudian assumption that sexuality is the mainspring of virtually everything, including literary merit. The most libidinous of their aesthetic manifestos is Ezra Pound's characterization of creativity as a “phallus or spermatozoid...