The Djuna Barnes Research Seminar

The Djuna Barnes Research Seminar

Monday 29th November
Room G32
Senate House South Block
6.00 - 8.00 pm


Dear All,

For our third and final session of the term Dr. Joanne Winning (Birkbeck) will be exploring the dialogues and interchanges between the art practises of Djuna Barnes and Thelma Wood in a consideration of Wood's impact on Barnes's creative development. Please see below for paper title and abstract. In addition, Cathryn Setz (Birkbeck) will also be presenting an informal discussion on Nightwood and anachronism. There is no additional reading required for the seminar.

As always, the Djuna Barnes Research Seminar is open to all and we look forward to seeing new and old faces on the 29th.

With very best wishes

Caroline Knighton and Cathryn Setz




Drawing the Line Between: Anachronism and Dialogue in the Art Practices of Thelma Wood and Djuna Barnes

In 1935, whilst editing Nightwood, Djuna Barnes writes to Emily Coleman: ‘I do not want to have Robin mentioned as one of the Bohemian world for the simple reason that I do not want to connect her in any way with the temporal world as we know it.’ Barnes’ removal of Vote from the ‘temporal world’ renders her a subject without a time and place, something like Barnes’ biographical construction of Thelma Wood herself, an artist anachronistically using the technique of silverpoint in the time of modernist experiment, without a birth certificate or a fixed birthplace. At the outset, this paper reinstates the time and the place of Wood’s aesthetic practice. Research reveals a body of visual work that might be characterized by its articulation of strange states of hybridity: human-animal, animal-plant, human-plant (themes that emerge so centrally in Nightwood). Wood articulates an erotic-grotesque that conveys the abjection and beauty inherent in sexual desire, especially dissident desire within a dominant culture that finds it abhorrent. This paper asks what effect Wood’s art practice has on Barnes, who came into the relationship with Wood, an established visual artist. Barnes returns to illustration in 1928, but as Frances M. Doughty argues ‘the illustrations for Ryder and Ladies Almanack show a marked break from Barnes’ prior work.’ In examining the anachronistic use of technique and the lines of form in the visual work of both, this paper argues for the existence of a more profoundly important creative dialogue between Barnes and Wood, than Barnes’ atemporal constructions seem to admit.