Abstracts Sociology

"Alien and Critical": The Modernist Satiric Practices of Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, and Virginia Woolf

by Benjamin Lee Taylor

This dissertation offers an extended analysis of the modernist satiric practices of authors Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, and Virginia Woolf in a selection of works spanning different genres published between 1913 and 1954. With these authors works as evidence, I suggest that satire undergoes a significant shift in the first half of the twentieth century as it departs from its premodern roots as a fixed genre or mode, instead becoming a diffuse element that intermittently shapes formal aspects and produces complex critiques. This shift partly results from new formulations of genderfrom altered understandings of masculinity and femininity to the emergence of what we now refer to as queer, nonbinary, and trans identitiesand the way in which what I call the instrumentality of satire enables a range of satiric attacks across different subject positions and a volatile political spectrum. Through a highly comparative approach, I draw upon formalist, feminist, and sociological theories to trace the different networks in which the texts of focus and their authors are embedded (networks of readers, artistic movements, political transformations, marketplaces, and discourses of gender and sexuality) to understand more thoroughly the satire that emerges from these texts. Each chapter pairs discrete investigations of works by each individual author, guided by an overarching topic (Chapter 1 explores networks of satire, Chapter 2 examines satiric method and the novel, and Chapter 3 considers satiric forms of life writing), and ends with a shorter section that compares the three authors works within a specific thematic framework (Chapter 1 with respect to the notion of authority, Chapter 2 through party scenes, and Chapter 3 concerning the portrait genre). My research reveals that the modernist satiric exchanges within these networks can be analyzed as, on the one hand, manifestations of the selected periods political dynamics and, on the other hand, cultural productions that altered how gender was discursively constructed within specific social environments of that period. In brief, the study illustrates how gender and its performance, aesthetics, and rhetoric become central to the production and function of satire in modernist art and literature.