UpDate - Vol. 15, No. 35, Page 3
June 20, 1996
Women writers; Prof. publishes books on 'Refiguring Modernism'

     Bonnie Kime Scott, English and women's studies, has published two
books on the writings of Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West and Djuna
Barnes. Her writing takes a new look at modernism, focusing on the
literary and cultural contexts that shaped the period and the three
writers.
     Published by Indiana University Press, the books are Refiguring
Modernism, Volume One: The Women of 1928 and Refiguring Modernism,
Volume Two: Postmodern Feminist Readings of Woolf, West and Barnes.
     Volume One takes its title from a year representing the second
wave of modernism, with the publication of Woolf's Orlando, West's The
Strange Necessity and Barnes' Ladies Almanack. The book examines the
lives of these women who began with the mixed endowment of gifted
parents and dysfunctional families-a frequent subject in their
writings.
     It moves to the women dabbling in the sexual liberation of the
period, their relations to the Edwardian "uncles" who controlled the
publishing world and, finally, to the effects of the suffrage movement
and the writers' relationships with other women.
     Scott also assesses how the women read and resisted "the men of
1914," the influence of  T.S. Eliot and the effect of the censorship
trial of Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness.
     "'The Women of 1928' is my own term, calling attention to a
second rise in modernism," Scott said. "It selects a year when Woolf,
West and Barnes were highly productive, having found strategies to
succeed as professional writers and a degree of formal license. They
had written their way out of some of their confining paternal and male
modernist relationships and literary patterns. They had found women-
made circles and journals."
     Volume Two draws on close analysis of the strategic writing
processes of Woolf, West and Barnes to show how each writer negotiated
modernist questions of enduring importance. Scott discusses Woolf's
"rapture with language," West's theme of negotiated escape from cycles
of destruction and Barnes' acts of representation. The volume
concludes with a consideration of "the end of modernism" and the
changing politics of 1939.
     Scott concedes that Wolf, West and Barnes represent a narrow
spectrum of women and even women of modernism. All three were white,
of British stock and born to educated families. She argues, however,
that the three do present subtle differences useful in gaining a
nuanced view of a portion of modernism.
     Scott received her bachelor's degree in English from Wellesley in
1967 and both her master's and doctoral degrees in 20th-century
British and American literature from the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill. She joined the University as an assistant professor in
1975.
     She regularly teaches courses on modernism, British literature,
women writers, feminist theory, multicultural studies and Irish
literature.
     Scott has published six books, more than 40 articles and has
coordinated several national and international conferences. Her
earliest work probed the Irish literary contexts of James Joyce, and
she continues to be interested in problems of gender and colonial
marginality in Ireland. She also has written two feminist studies of
James Joyce and is the editor of a collection of Joyce essays.
                                                          -Gerry Elter