Alfred Prufrock', Orlando and To the Lighthouse. Eliot while offering readings of major work by both writers, including The Waste Land, 'The Love Song of J.

The book includes extensive archival research on some mostly unknown bawdy poetry by T. Modernism, Memory, and Desire proposes that some striking correspondences exist in Eliot and Woolf's poetic, fictional, critical, and autobiographical texts, particularly in their recurring turn to the language of desire, sensuality, and the body to render memory's processes. Their writings, though, are rarely paired. Eliot and Virginia Woolf were almost exact contemporaries, readers and critics of each others' work, and friends for over twenty years. Ultimately, morbid vitalism points a way toward a broader conversation between life-oriented modernist scholarship on vitalism and affect, on the one hand, and ongoing inquiries into the relationship among death, Decadence, and modernism, on the other.

Matthew O’Connor, by which life and death are conceived as variant expressions of a single force, and the subject is modeled as an assemblage of affects, impersonal but inherently social, that can be understood primarily through its pursuit of what Jack Halberstam has called “generative models of failure.” In exploring this mode of subjectivity, Barnes seeks to undermine a host of ostensible oppositions (hope and fear, ascendence and decadence, success and failure, morbidity and vitality), opening up a conceptual and affective space for thinking through-if not necessarily beyond-the ubiquity of despair in twentieth-century modernity. Synthesizing Decadent aesthetics and elements of Spinoza’s vitalist philosophy, Barnes produces a “morbid vitalism,” exemplified by Dr. This essay frames Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood as an attempt to overcome an impasse between the discourses of hope and the discourses of despair in an interwar period in many ways preoccupied with questions of mortality.

Nightwood book