This dissertation explores the role of autobiography in the work of four queer modernists: W.H. Auden, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, and H.D. While autobiographical elements are present in the work of modernist writers ranging from James Joyce to Virginia Woolf, autobiography’s role in the period is little attended to in current scholarship. This project re-centers literary modernism’s engagement with autobiography by considering these four authors’ poetry, prose, and criticism. These writers’ sexualities gave them a unique relationship to the confessional culture of the early 20th century; while they rejected the self-disclosure often associated with autobiography and critiqued the genre, they nonetheless embraced and transformed it. I argue that these authors turn towards autobiography not as the narration of a life, but as a mode of what Michel Foucault terms “self-writing,” the practice of intentionally developing a self rather than coming to “know” oneself. Reading alongside Foucault, I argue that these four feminist and queer authors’ self-writing, composed during the period when psychoanalysis became the privileged discourse for psychology and for literary criticism, imagines possibilities for self-understanding and intersubjectivity to the side of psychoanalysis. Their eclectic sources in thinking through the scope and form of autobiography—ranging from Auden’s analysis of Baudelaire and development of an ascetic poetics, to Stein’s engagement with William James and pragmatism, to H.D.’s interest in Eastern thought, to Bishop’s engagement with animal others—provide an expanded understanding of modernist accounts of subjectivity and relationality. Their work thus re-defines both the autos and bios of autobiography.
van Laer, Rebecca,
"Autobiography's Queer Forms: Modernist Self-Writing from Auden to H.D."
(2017).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0Z31X44
