Belzec Sobibor Treblinka

In volume two of her revisionist study of modernism, Bonnie Kime Scott draws on close analysis of the strategic writing processes of Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Djuna Barnes to show how each writer negotiated modernist questions of enduring importance to postmodern readers. Woolf's rapture with language, Barnes's bestiaries, and West's polemicism help us address questions of logocentrism, essentialism, and the prevalence of binary logic in Western thought. The positioning of Woolf with two other female modernists provides a network of comparison that has been denied in her solo admission to the male canon. Scott closes with a consideration of the ends of modernism, assessing the volatile politics of 1939. While many celebrated male modernists flirted with fascism or tried to shore up against ruin, Woolf, West, and Barnes exposed the fragility of cultural scaffoldings and pointed to the mental resources needed for cultural renewal.