Week 10, Restrictions and Obstructions: Research Project Aim

My discussion from Week 7's blog "Madness and the Margins the Erotic: Sex and Death" was framed as a potential entrance point into Unica Zürn's Dark Spring for additional research/analysis.  Zürn's text struck me as the most intriguing among the works we have read in regard to its depiction of gender and identity, and when I wrote that blog, it felt to be a natural move and fit into an aspect of my ongoing project: to explore the constructions of voices, bodies, and identities that are often relegated to the margins of literature, particularly those marked as aged or culturally unmarketable, and the dysmorphic effect of the societal gaze.  What I find remarkable in Zürn's work is how certain characters are framed as Ideal-I's based on a filmic representations of gendered bodies.  For this project, I aim to to pursue the mise-en-scène-like stagings of bodies--namely the spectacle of the body--and how they inform Zürn's protagonist while simultaneously expose how cultural signifiers serve as signposts for gender.    

My Working Bibliography so far is as follows:

Gerstenberger, Katharina.  “Writing Herself into the Center: Centrality and Marginality in the

            Autobiographical Writing of Nahida Lazarus, Adelheid Popp, and Unica Zürn.”  Diss. 

            Cornell University, 1993.  Print. 

Littler, Margaret.  “Madness, Misogyny and the Feminine in Aesthetic Modernism: Unica Zürn

            and Claire Goll.”  Yvan Goll—Claire Goll: Texts and Contexts.  Eds. Eric Robertson and

            Robert Vilain.  Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997.  Print.  153-173.    

Lusty, Natalya.  “Introduction: Disturbing Subjects: Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.”

            Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.  Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Co.,

            2007.  Print.  1-18. 

Plumer, Esra.  “The Luminary Forest: Robert Desnos and Unica Zürn’s Tales of

            (Dis)Enchantment and Transformation.”  Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment.  Eds.

            Catriona McAra and David Calvin.  Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge

            Scholars Publishing, 2011.  Print.  115-129.

Rupprecht, Caroline. “The Violence of Merging: Unica Zürn’s Writing (on) the Body.”  Subject

            to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender.  Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern

            University Press, 2006.  Print.  132-164.    

Suleiman, Susan Rubin.  “A Double-Margin: Reflections on Women Writers and the Avant-

            Garde in France.”  Yale French Studies, 75; The Politics of Tradition: Placing Women in

            French Literature (1988): 148-172.  JSTOR.  Web.  12 March 2013.