BETWEEN RHETORIC AND PERFORMATIVITY: THE VERBAL AND VISUAL ART OF FOUR MODERNIST WOMEN

The early twentieth century witnessed a special intensity in the relationship among different forms of artistic expression. Cases of osmosis multiplied between writing and painting, entailing the negotiation of techniques, giving voice to a myriad of hybrid forms. Moving on this fruitful field of research, my thesis aims at investigating the cases of some female writers who were artists at the same time, as they occupy a position of their own in the already fascinating frame of writing-artistic partnership. Specifically, Djuna Barnes, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy, and Zelda Fitzgerald appear to share artistic milieux and similar biographical experiences, so that they fit comparative settings. On the transnational chessboard of modernism, these four women moved among major centres – including London, Berlin, Munich, Paris, Italy and New York – to weave a complex network of ‘upstream modernism’. The texture entangling exchanges of expressive techniques and gender awareness appears to be particularly dense in their verbal and visual works, unmediated and spontaneous, original and dynamic. It is interesting to observe how these female artists’ twin talents of writing and painting clearly influenced verbal and visual choices in terms of genres, forms and patterns. In addition, these women traced their own paths as divergent from that of men’s, both of the past and of their time. In the already extensive criticism of (some of) these artists, there seems to be a still little trodden path of intermediality, upon which my thesis aims to expand.