THE STARVING STUDENT

01

Virginia Woolf -- Orlando

If we are not meant to read this book as an exercise in time travel or fantasy, how are we meant to read it and its depiction of time? The question haunted me as I turned the pages. It wasn’t until I neared the novel’s end and witnessed Orlando’s entrance to the “present moment” that I began to make some sense of it. I by no means have an exhaustive or even a confident reading of Woolf’s use of time, but I do think that her construction of time in Orlando hinges on the modernist understanding of the present moment.

 

02

Jean Rhys -- Wide Sargasso Sea

Need to add details.

 

03

Djuna Barnes --- Nightwood

I know that Finnegan's Wake is supposed to be the modernist novel of night, but Barnes's dreamy concoction depicts nighttime societies and desires. I'm interest in Robin Vote's role as an orphan and how it might be responsible for her unexplainable lure. I still need to work all of this out.

 

04

James Joyce -- Dubliners

I love James Joyce--that delicate dewdrop of a writer. I love the vignettes Joyce provides to capture the coming-of-age of a country. One of the most important elements of the text (at least for me, anyways) is the role mentors play in this text, especially early on. What constitutes a good mentor? Who should leave a movement? How much should we be influenced by others? How do mentors shift when they enter and leave different worlds: domestic, educational, sexual, artistic, political, etc.

 

05

Edna O'Brien -- Country Girls 

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06

Yeats - - Cathleen Ni Houlihan

To form a coherent national identity, it would be necessary to account for political failures: an explanation has to be provided for why a country and people that is so great has failed to overcome so many obstacles. Creating a cultural rhetoric that emphasizes martyr-heroes transforms a narrative of political defeat into a narrative of moral and spiritual triumph and fosters a national sense of pride. The Catholic liturgy of saints provides a convenient foundation for building this rhetoric. Pulled from the already existing shared spiritual identity, sainted martyrs provided a possible reason for perceived political failure: moral integrity. When saints die for a cause, they achieve immortality, that is a spiritual victory over death and sin. By marking martyrs as a nation’s heroes, one transforms perceptions of defeat into perceptions of victory; death and loss is no longer a failure, but a triumph. The rhetoric of martyr-heroes allows a nation to clear itself of self-doubt. Within this rhetoric, to be a hero means to be a martyr. In Yeats’ play, Cathleen promises young men of Ireland that they will achieve immortality through the songs sung of their self-sacrifice. In other words, Cathleen promises that their deaths will ensure they achieve hero status. Cathleen ni Houlihan is not Yeats’ first character or play, though, to tie to the heroic achievement to the fatal sacrifice. But when I revisited Cathleen Ni Houlihan, I was struck by Delia’s situation and her desperation and the fact that not a single character in the play speaks to her. Here is a woman on what is supposed to be her wedding day discovering that her fiancé is leaving her, and no one can even spare her a consoling pat on the shoulder. I began wondering what did Cathleen’s movement meant not for men like Michael, but for women like Delia.

 

07

T. S. Eliot -- The Waste Land

Will add details later.

 

08

Mina Loy -- Lost Lunar Baedeker 

Despite the work of feminist scholars, literary critics still typically discuss the representation of gender using traditional binaries. Modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and even W. B. Yeats labored to synthesize such binaries in their own work and scholars have since endeavored to examine the hybridization of the poems, yet have not applied the same critical eye to Loy’s collections. Loy’s work presents an exceptional opportunity to examine the syntheses of nineteenth-century binaries in twentieth-century literature. Loy both perpetuates and collapses the critical distance between pairings like east and west, old and new, and masculine and feminine; despite this, critics continue to analyze the techniques of writers like Loy through gendered lens. By deconstructing these limiting roles, Loy opens the world for female composers to take center stage: the new hybrid women.

 

09

W. B. Yeats -- Selected poems

I have a lot to say about this, but not just yet.

 

10

Gertrude Stein -- Three Lives

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