Between figures: Gender, sex, and the space of modernism (Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, Djuna Barnes)

This dissertation combines early twentieth-century Anglo-American literary work with late twentieth-century literary theory to point out a logic of similarity that has not been adequately addressed. I suggest not only that certain modernist authors anticipate the conclusions of post-structuralism, but that these writers' attention to gender and sexuality and their role in writing structures challenges and extends post-structuralist claims about the grounds of signification. Focusing on Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Anais Nin, and Djuna Barnes, I argue that modernist literature offers models of linguistic materiality that will revitalize post-structuralist theory by challenging it to speak more directly of a material ground that is not hopelessly indebted to metaphysics.; I approach contemporary literary theory as a reading of modernism, and I identify the shared locus as a figure of "betweeness," by which I mean a transitional, liminal, pre-positional dynamic. The texts chosen for this project demonstrate a self-conscious acknowledgement of the "between" as an enabling figure that manifests itself both thematically and formally. Concentrating on semiotic and linguistic strategies that women writers use to represent figures of women, female sexuality, and the materiality of language, I argue that Stein, Loy, Nin, and Barnes anticipate one of the most startling conclusions of post-structuralism--that meaning is based upon the interplay of differences between things. Jacques Derrida's notion of the "entre" and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection both present the between as the site of differentiation and therefore the condition of meaning in linguistic and psychological structures. I argue that literary theory's investigation of the means of articulation of signs and the subjects who use them requires an analysis of the material aspects of language, which we find in full flower in the work of these modernist women writers. These writers locate within this ephemeral play of difference an embodied medium that is neither a metaphysical ground nor the site of an inert and meaningless materiality: for these modernists, language's body is the erotic site of proximity and exchange between the material elements of articulation and the "real" bodies of speaking subjects.