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An experiment in what Elizabeth Bowen calls "creative criticism," this co-written fictional dialogue explores the figure of the heart in Bowen's work. Special attention is given to The Death of the Heart and to the short story "A Queer Heart," both first published in 1938. Drawing on correspondences with the fiction of Sheridan Le Fanu and E.M. Forster, the poetry of W.B. Yeats, and the philosophical thinking of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, we dramatize an understanding of the value and importance of Bowen's work in embodying a new and singular modernist conception of the heart as other.
Keywords: Elizabeth Bowen / Jean-Luc Nancy / demonic / queer / heart
Andrew Bennett ([email protected]) is professor of English at the University of Bristol. He is co-author of Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives (Macmillan, 1995) with Nicholas Royle, with whom he has also published^?/ Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (6th edn., Routledge, 2023) and This Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (2nd edn., Routledge, 2024). Other books include Suicide Century: Literature and Suicide from James Joyce to David Foster Wallace (Cambridge UP, 2017) and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro (Cambridge, 2023). He is currently completing a book-length study of the letters of John Keats.
Nicholas Royle ([email protected]) is professor emeritus of English at the University of Sussex. Besides his co-authored books with Andrew Bennett, he is the author of Telepathy and Literature (1990), The Uncanny (2003), Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), and Helene Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing (2020). He has also published two novels, Quilt (2010) and An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017), and two memoirs, Mother (2020) and David Bowie, Enid Blyton, and the Sun Machine (2023). He is joint-managing editor of the Oxford Literary Review and director ofquickfiction.co.uk. He is currently working on a detective novel.
AB: Skipped a beat.
NR: Already?
AB: Double-hearted.
NR: Writing together, with one heart.
AB: A queer heart.
NR: We're going to talk about what we take to be the queer heart of modernism, by focusing on Elizabeth Bowen, and especially on a story from her war-time collection Look at All Those Roses (1941), but
AB: We have to get our breath first-
NR: We have...