"Chloe Liked Olivia": Modernist Avantgarde Women

"Chloe liked Olivia", Virginia Woolf writes in her groundbreaking feminist essay "A Room of One's Own", first published in 1929. Having examined the reasons that had made it difficult for women to establish literary traditions for centuries, Woolf argues that it has now become possible for women to tell completely new types of stories. Indeed, the interwar period stands for an era of feminine liberation and self-assertion. Women in Britain and the US not only gained the political vote, but they also became part of a much wider cultural and social sphere. In literature and the arts, this becomes evident in the matter-of-course manner in which women such as Virginia Woolf and her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the storyteller Isak Dinesen and the avantgarde poet and performer Edith Sitwell positioned themselves as public figures, writers, artists and intellectuals. In this seminar we will explore how modernist avantgarde women explored and created new possibilities for women: how they made innovative use of unprecedented freedoms as they experimented with aesthetic expression as well as gender roles, identities and desires both in their writing and their self-fashioning, often turning everyday life into art as part of their modernist practice. Moreover, we will look at the ways in which the self-expression of these avantgarde figures have inspired later generations of women ranging from the eccentric fashion editor Diana Vreeland to the androgynous film icon Tilda Swinton.