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" The Sacred and the Esoteric : "
Slingsby, Thomas Luke
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Latin Dissertation
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| Record Number
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1097339
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TLets508975
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| Main Entry
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Slingsby, Thomas Luke
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| Title & Author
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The Sacred and the Esoteric :\ Slingsby, Thomas Luke
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| College
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University of Sussex
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| Date
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2010
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| student score
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2010
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Abstract
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During her lifetime, the modernist novels and short stories of Mary Butts (1890 1937)were championed by luminaries such as Bryher and Ezra Pound. Thereafterher work fell into neglect. Since 1984 Butts has been the subject of renewedcritical interest which has gathered pace over the last decade. Still, much of heroeuvre is yet to receive sustained attention, and scholars are divided over whetherButts' sacral modernism should be championed as a harbinger of liberatorysubjectivities or denounced as validating a racial nationalism. Whereas critics havetended to emphasise one of these elements of Butts' oeuvre to the exclusion of theother, this thesis uses the concepts of the sacred and the esoteric to illustrate theirintermeshed nature. Butts' preoccupation with spiritual experience produces notdoctrinal constancy, but constellations of syncretic and geographically contingentpractices. The term sacred describes Butts' hope that her literary rituals wouldrejuvenate the "Waste Land" of interwar culture. This attitude prevails in herwork of 1916 - 1928, and correlates with a phase of "flight" which sees her reactagainst dispossession from her native Dorset, absorb continental influences, andexplore the fractal subjectivities of the city. Chapter Two sees Butts developing aBergsonian optics which posits the redemption of her "war-ruined generation"from the urban "logic of solids". Chapter Three considers transitional texts inwhich the object is deployed to probe the ontological limits of the sacral text.Butts' work from 1928 onwards is marked by a shift to esoteric poetics: it encodesa process of "settlement" which retreats from modernity into centripetal,exclusionary metaphysics. In Chapter One, analysis of the holographs of TheCrystal Cabinet (1937) shows how a conflicted attitude to the body restricts Butts'palingenetic autogeographics to esoteric registers of meaning. Chapter Fourexplores the revisionary, homosocial politics of her 1930s classical novels andshows how the rarified psychological spaces privileged here are invested inviolence against the African 'other
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| Added Entry
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University of Sussex
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