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Writing Bodies: Isadora Duncan, Movement, and Metaphor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2015

Harmony Jankowski
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Abstract

Building on the work of interdisciplinary literary and dance scholars from Frank Kermode to Carrie Preston, this paper attends to depictions of Isadora Duncan appearing in novels, poems, and portraits by modernist writers such as Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, and Gertrude Stein, among others. These diversely experimental texts hold in common a preoccupation with Duncan's perpetual motion, emphasizing shifts in her personal life, choreography, and performance quality over time. “Writing Bodies” theorizes the different expressive roles her image takes on, arguing that the texts use Duncan's image to query the relationship between embodied movement and its literary representations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Congress on Research in Dance Conference Proceedings , Volume 2015 , Fall 2015 , pp. 83 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Harmony Jankowski 2015 

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