Word: djuna
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...ambition was to be a great obscure writer. I found novels by people like Djuna Barnes, whose work never became as mainstream as novels can become - I was a bit of a snob, I suppose, but that was my ambition, the obscurity was important. I used to read Evergreen Review and the Paris Review, Edward Albee's first plays, [William S.] Burroughs and [Vladimir] Nabokov and so on, many of whom did accidentally become relatively mainstream, like Nabokov with Lolita, and Albee with Zoo Story...
Surrounding this parasite of literature is a cast of characters as diverse in chronology as they are in personality. There's an angry and suicidal Ernest Hemingway who acts as Garnett's servant, the under-recognized and frustrated feminist author Djuna Barnes, the heroine-addicted mother of Eugene O'Neil, and the aforementioned Anas Nin, played with delightfully French self-absorption by Karen MacDonald. Not to mention the entire cast of characters from The Brothers Karamazov, with Alyosha Karamazov (played with effective, i.e. not annoying, wholesomeness by Sean Dugan) serving as Durang's Everyman character in this absurdist romp...
...compared with the canonically "postmodern" novelists Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover. The result of this comparison is to redefine the origins of the fragmentation of the subject that is generally seen as characteristic of literary postmodernity. The "marginal" writers chosen Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anaïs Nin, Djuna Barnes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Ralph Ellison-present a rather motley collection. When I spoke to Harper, and Assistant Professor of English and American Literature and Languages and Afro-American Studies here at Harvard, earlier this week, he explained that the subjects of his analysis had indeed been cosen 'without rhyme...
...Instead the book becomes compelling because of the obviously personal identification of the critic with his material. The woks discussed are not schematized into a definition of marginally; rather, they represent a sample of the richness of various traditions: "We could conceive of (Anaïs Nin and Djuna Bares) as minor in the sense that they are experimental... but in the case of Ellison, The Invisible Man is standardly seen as a major work in the minor tradition, that it say that its minorities does drive from the social minority of Ellison himself." By tracing evidence of what...
...Mairie, and though it has become a bit fancy -- the old goldfish tank has disappeared, along with the chessboard -- it is still a neighborhood cafe. It bears its literary traditions lightly. It hardly remembers that Saul Bellow used to drink here, and William Faulkner too, or that Djuna Barnes set several scenes in Nightwood here. In fact, when the proprietor was once asked what she remembered of Barnes, she said she had never heard of her. But the two coupes of icy Pommery tasted grand. Hemingway was right: Paris is much changed, but the moveable feast can still be celebrated...