Becoming-Modernists: Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein

Abstract

Barnes, Loy and Stein pre-exist this present study as modernist figures as well as embodied subjects who inhabited and wrote within the first half of the twentieth century. As I am seeking to launch new ways of considering their work, this pre-existence needs to be taken into account in an act of dialogue but also in a critical enterprise to draw new lines of meaning-production and theoretical relation; that is, articulations.

[A]ll becomings are already molecular. That is because becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or someone. Nor is it to proportion formal relations. Neither of these two figures of analogy is applicable to becoming: neither the imitation of a subject nor the proportionality of a form. Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, of the functions one fulfils, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming and through which one becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire.

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 272)