A Literary Feminist Phenomenology of Place in Early Twentieth Century Women’s Writing

This thesis develops a critical approach to women’s experience by engaging with phenomenology and modernist poetics of place. It critiques the androcentricity of phenomenology and philosophical abstractions of gender and space, arguing that a feminist phenomenology with its focus on alternative modes of being in a diverse but socially and gender-stratified world can more aptly articulate experiential specificities that neither fortify nor fit into conventional paradigms of experience. This thesis discusses the imaginative and aesthetic rendering of women’s experiences of rooms in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, and Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover,” “Pink May,” and “Hand in Glove.

‘If Our Love Existed in Chinese Tense’: Temporal Tensions in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

This article is a close textual reading of Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). In the novel, the protagonist Z confesses she is not good at tenses. Her uncertain command of temporality transposes from the context of grammatical tense to her love life, where her desire to forever be with her English partner conflicts with his belief that the future is not in the present. As her language learning struggles mirror the widening fissures in her relationship, temporal tensions arise. For one, Z’s first language (Chinese) does not have tenses, while her second (English) is dominated by time-sensitive verbs. This article is interested in the temporal tensions (time as linear or as looping) that illuminate the cultural and linguistic factors affecting Z’s perception of love, and reveal the gendered power structure (her male partner’s dominance over Z’s female subservience) that steers the relationship. Her ruminations on love and efforts at making sense of tenses draw together an ideographic scripting of a kind of love that deprioritises temporality to counteract the discipline and development of love in a linear time culture. Love in ‘Chinese tense’, as Z desires, is one that defies progression, future-proofed and faithful as a picture is unchanging

Bent on the Dark: Negative Perception in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood

10.1080/08164649.2019.1679018Australian Feminist Studies34101325-34

The rhetoric of space in early twentieth century women’s writing : writing places, making spaces in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight

Modernist writing is fundamentally about experiencing the new spatial phenomena of the city that mushroomed in the early twentieth century- how facilities such as lavabos, hotels, automobiles, urban structures and streets, encroach on the unsuspecting modern individual. While spatiality expanded in the early 1900s, strategic spatial arrangements were concurrently invested to fortify gendered power structures. Gender stratification reinforced the urban polis as a masculine, public center while the countryside and home were respectively the fecund Mother garden and the private, nurturing realm. Such spatial setups problematized existing gender politics that spatially and socially segregate. The paper will analyze specific places such as the home, parks, streets, omnibuses, salons, hotel rooms, cafés and lavabos in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight. In the context of this paper, place would consider the physical localities while space examines the philosophical form and social relations that underpin. Through these architectural spaces, it strives to elucidate the concept of a potentially transgressive philosophical space- a coalescence of all tangible place, social space and abstract space that reaches beyond mere physical, capable of exploring multiple spatial dimensions and spheres. Mrs Dalloway will provide the general physical cityscape as an overarching masculine and affluent place while Good Morning, Midnight allows the examination of liminal places of the city. This paper is interested in extricating the ways in which these protagonists wander into streets and places of the metropolis and how consciousness can be etched upon places. It seeks to investigate the different modes in which the Modernist subjectivity infiltrates the narratives, transforming place to space. Above all, it will look into the Modernist novel as a whole- how the narrative functions as a textual and creative space where places and spaces are in dialogue, ever progressing achronologically and multi-dimensionally.Master of Arts (HSS

She wanders outside the ambit of civilization : discourses of nomadism in twentieth-century women's writing.

This paper extends the sociologically-related term ‘nomadism’ to a literary analysis. It will figuratively map out nomadism along the twentieth-century, across notable women writers such as Muriel Spark, Jeanette Winterson and Djuna Barnes. Nomadism, conventionally tied to migration patterns of people who move from pastures to pastures, often cyclically and repeatedly trespassing similar paths, is figuratively skewed in relation to the nomad and her wanderings alongside the nomadic amalgamation of narratives, subjectivities, forms and categories. It is noteworthy that most sociologists and travel journalists are inclined to define nomadism as a convenient alternative to civilization. Nomadism’s avocation of liminality, processes and in-between craves and grants a creative space for autonomy and individuality that the twentieth-century woman has been deprived of. More than a mere opposition and substitution of civilization, nomadism goes beyond the subverting of patriarchal hegemony and aims to puncture all power structures that stifle and restricts. This paper will delineate how texts are manipulated with the absence or contrivance of the narrator and protagonist to actualize the nomadic quality of accommodating multiplicity and alternatives to traditional, civilized story-telling. It will then address how diversity, fusion and mediation in nomadism create a liminal and creative space that despite transience, offers the trapped and stifled twentieth-century woman the only means to a world outside the patriarchal, regimented and stigmatized society.Bachelor of Art

Publisher Correction: Association between pet ownership and physical activity levels, atopic conditions, and mental health in Singapore: a propensity score-matched analysis (Scientific Reports, (2020), 10, 1, (19898), 10.1038/s41598-020-76739-2)

10.1038/s41598-021-85732-2Scientific Reports111614