| During most of the twentieth century, significant critical attention has been devoted alternately to two parts of H.D.'s career as a writer: her imagist period (poetry written from 1913 to 1925) and her epic period (poetry written from 1942 to 1960). As critical interest in H.D. has grown over the past two decades, some studies have tried to reassess her middle period but little work has been done to explore the important conjunction between H.D.'s work with literature and H.D.'s work with film in this period. This dissertation argues that H.D.'s unique filmic sensibility not only pervades her middle period but also provides a means to redefine her earliest work in imagism.; Resisting the limitations imposed on her by heterosexist paradigms, H.D.'s “middle period” fiction, poetry, and essays anticipate psychoanalytic film theory and develop the concept of the bisexual gaze. With that gaze apparent in her often-misread imagist poetry, H.D. also applies her unconventional notions of readership to her reviews of contemporary films and her starring role in the POOL film, Borderline. Understanding film as a revolutionary part of the modernist movement, H.D. would repeatedly depict film as an expansive art form that undermines the heterosexism implicit in the work of thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence. |
