Prophetic Reading: Sisterhood and Psychoanalysis in H.D.’s HERmione

This article offers a comparative reading of H.D.’s 1927 kunstlerroman à clef, HERmione, and Freud’s Dora alongside an intertextual close reading of its dense web of literary allusions in order to argue that it offers a sustained critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and an alternative origin story for the condition of hysteria. Drawing on the notion of prophecy as it is thematised in the novel, the article demonstrates H.D.’s prefiguring of Juliet Mitchell’s recent reconfiguration of hysteria as a response to, replacement by, or failure of identification with a sibling

The Nomadic Experiment of a Steppe Land Flâneuse

Imagine the flâneuse in Ulaan Bataar, with its streets unnavigable for pedestrians, and its ever-shifting ger neighborhoods that abut onto crumbling Gulag architecture, not to mention its fierce resurrection of Genghis Khan whose portrait engraved into the overlooking hills declares the city’s imperious nomadic autonomy. This paper investigates the mobilization of the 21st-century flâneuse by the contrary material forces of nomadism and urbanism that confront and transform her as she stumbles, drifts and speeds through Mongolia\u27s city and steppes. The focus of investigation concerns the (im)possible conjunction of nomadism and flânerie on the frontier of the urban and the edge of gender