Creaturely Metaphors in D.H. Lawrence, H.D., and Virginia Woolf
New dissertation in Literature by Maria Trejling at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University.
Maria Trejling's doctoral thesis Creaturely Metaphors in D.H. Lawrence, H.D., and Virginia Woolf. Illustration by Evelina Jonsson.
In the field of literary animal studies, metaphorical readings of animals have gained a bad reputation. One reason for this is the perception of metaphor as a substitutional trope through which an animal becomes replaceable and discardable in exchange for proper meaning. But how, then, should we respond when literary creatures refuse to stay put within literality? This question guides the present study, whose principal purpose is to explore the interaction between animals, metaphors, and literarity. Through careful readings of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), H.D.’s Asphodel (written in the 1920s), and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), the dissertation studies how metaphorical animals invite literarity into these works. Drawing on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and the tropology of Paul Ricœur, it also illuminates the spectrality of metaphor, showing that it makes literature a site where readers can encounter a creature—not to name, tame, or train it, but to speak to it, and to await its response.
Forum Modernism at Stockholm University is an association for researchers whose work in some way concerns modernism, both through studies of its various mainstream and marginalized expressions, and through critical examinations of the concept as such.
