Existing off the Map: Reading Stein and Barnes as Hybrid Architects
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The Department of English seeks to provide all university students with the skills of effective communication and critical thinking, as well as imparting knowledge of literature, creative writing, linguistics, speech and technical communication to students within and outside of the department.
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The Department of English and Speech was formed in 1939 from the merger of the Department of English and the Department of Public Speaking. In 1971 its name changed to the Department of English.
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1939-present
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- Department of English and Speech (1939-1971)
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- College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (parent college)
- Department of English (predecessor, 1898-1939)
- Department of Public Speaking (predecessor, 1898-1939)
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Abstract
Countless scholarly works have been devoted to the modernist movement and, more specifically, to Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood. The notion of hybridity, however, has remained largely absent from published works about these texts. This project seeks to uncover hybrid elements from these two texts as well as determine some of the implications of their hybridity. I begin the analysis by exploring the links between Gloria Anzaldya's Borderlands, Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. Together these three writers' theories offer a working definition of hybridity as a move or a strategy that seeks to create habitable spaces where boundaries of right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, are pushed aside. Tracing this overarching stance on hybridity through the Autobiography and Nightwood unveils hybrid texts drafted through the use of gender play, the refusal of compulsory heterosexuality, and literary innovation. From this stance, the Autobiography and Nightwood have renewed power to change literary history as well as the future, literary or otherwise.