Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy by John Champagne (original) (raw)

Modernism/modernity, 2014

Abstract

860 to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” to theorize Woolf’s attitude to sexual difference and introduces the concepts which will be so key to the remaining readings in his study: deterritorialization and the becoming-woman of writing, which, Ryan notes, bears an affinity with Woolf’s subversive concept of androgyny in their shared rejection of patriarchy and phallogocentrism. Drawing on these concepts, Ryan coins the neologism “tri-s,” pronounced tries, which he defines as a reading strategy emerging from Woolf’s refusal to allow figures of twos and threes to contain the energy they generate within their formal frames, but rather to follow their lines of flight outwards towards “other subjects and objects, bodies and environments” (77). Chapter 3 continues in this vein, queering certain objects in Orlando as a “reconceptualisation of desire as depersonalised and shared among human and non-human forms” (20). Ryan’s particular gifts as a critic are on full display in his highly original queering (queer-ring) of Orlando’s wedding ring. Chapter 4 turns to animal studies (a field of growing interest on its own, as well as in the burgeoning study of eco-criticism), which strives to consider nonhuman animals without setting them apart as the human’s Other or subordinate. Earlier critics of Flush, Woolf’s novel told from the perspective of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, have suggested Woolf treats the animal as an allegory, a metaphor, or a symbol. In his discussion of Flush, Ryan refutes these readings and considers various contested issues which are thought to comprise the boundary between the human and the nonhuman (nudity, mirrors, and the gaze) to show that Woolf’s portrait of Flush not only is not anthropomorphic, but it subverts the human-animal hierarchy and reveals the biases and limitations of a purely human, language-based worldview. Ryan extends this rethinking of human-centered hierarchies with a final chapter that addresses posthumanism and the materiality of “life itself,” another Woolfian power trope. Ryan reads Woolf’s own thinking about atoms and physics, first through the philosophy-physics of her contemporary Niels Bohr and then through Deleuze, and finds that the “immanent, posthuman ontology” of The Waves reveals the dense entanglement of the human with the nonhuman (21). Deleuze’s concept of the haecceity, an event “formed of aggregates of bodies, objects, and spaces” and “‘consist[ing] entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect or be affected’” (189–90), nicely pulls the strands of the chapter together and provides a seductive framework for thinking of certain “moments of being” in Woolf as moments of “becoming-cosmic” (190). In his introduction, Ryan points out the limitations of a routinized way of doing theory that reduces texts to “examples of theoretical concepts” (6). This puts the reader on alert: will Ryan be able to pull off anything different? But for a few moments, which are few and far between (a discussion of becoming-minoritarian in Flush does get a bit wrapped up in its own vocabulary), Ryan provides a fresh, vigorous reading-together of Woolf and theory that is deeply rewarding for the Woolf scholar, and to the wider community of scholars in literary studies and beyond.

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