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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee Jan 2013

Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

In Jacob’s Room (1922) and Nightwood (1936), Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes use plant life to express a profound ambivalence about the masculine-inflected ordering functions of art and morality. They show that these processes codify lived experience and distance it from the feminine and sexual. To counter this turn towards the urban inauthentic, both novels depict non-urban spaces to upend conventional notions of usefulness. They fixate on evanescent flowers, wild forests, and untillable fields as sites of resistance whose fragility and remoteness are strengths. In Jacob’s Room, I argue that the eponymous protagonist is destroyed by his conventional education …


Creating Room For A Singularity Of Our Own: Reading Sue Lange's "We, Robots", Marleen S. Barr Jan 2013

Creating Room For A Singularity Of Our Own: Reading Sue Lange's "We, Robots", Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

The accessibility of Lange’s text might mitigate against recognizing its importance. Lange’s simple sentence structure and direct communicative mode convey a presently overlooked logical moral assertion: the impending Singularity is not a male-dominated patriarchal domain. The Singularity, in other words, should not be construed in a manner which excludes women and feminism. This assertion is patently obvious. But, nonetheless, it is often ignored. Before I read Lange’s novella as a description of the Singularity which feminists can embrace, I include the following background information: 1) a discussion about why the discourse relating to the Singularity needs to be expanded and …