Kate Krueger
Honors Department
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
will speak on
“Gendered Space and Queer Time in Victorian and Modernist Short Stories”
Abstract:
In my research, I aim to provoke discussion about the strategies of narrative construction, the revision of spatial and temporal rhetoric, and the negotiations within the literary marketplace through which women writers were able to produce short fiction that was unconventional in both form and function. This presentation will offer a brief overview of my scholarship, including my book, British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850-1930: Reclaiming Social Space, in which I examine short stories by a number of Victorian and Modernist writers. The emergence of the short story in Britain in the Victorian and modernist period coincided with the rise of the professional woman writer. Circulating through the periodical press, short stories contributed to ongoing debates regarding ‘the Woman Question’. By addressing a critically neglected form, this book reveals the way in which women writers incited social change by complicating Victorian and modernist notions of gender and social space.
My current research builds upon this work as I consider another crucial element to these representations of gendered experience: time. Critic J. Halberstam argues in In a Queer Time and Place that queer time “[allows] participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.” Late Victorian and modernist women writers seized upon the short story to create narratives that rejected or violated this trajectory. I consider how writers including Radclyffe Hall and Elizabeth Bowen, whose work I’ll briefly address in this presentation, reimagined the structural conventions of the short story in order to articulate the way in which their characters fantasize alternative times, bodies, and possibilities for themselves. Their characters’ psychological experiences in war and postwar England encourage movement across social barriers. The experimental temporality of modernist women’s short fiction attests to the transgressive potential of art that charts dislocation – the unfixability and unpredictability – of gendered bodies in and over time.
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
9:00 am
Zoom link:
https://clarkson.zoom.us/j/91376163745?pwd=SUgyV0Z5RENZdTJjSFNqOG1lVXlzdz09 Meeting ID: 913 7616 3745
Passcode: 577373
