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The Body in the Intertext: Modernism's Unruly Interiors

A colleague in music theory once suggested to me that a work of choreography created in relation to a music composition might actually function as one form of theoretical analysis of the music score. Extrapolating this idea to the intertextual domain of dance and literature, one might propose that a choreographic rendering of a literary text offers one means of theorizing or analyzing it. As a mode of creative inquiry, “theorizing” literary texts through embodied analysis has only been outstripped, perhaps, by theorizing music compositions through such methods. As a heuristic paradigm focusing on how dance has been born out of textual material, it has come into its time. Susan Jones’s Literature, Modernism, and Dance builds on this paradigm and others as she explores the reciprocal relationships that developed between literature and dance in the first half of the twentieth century. The book is the culmination of years of observing and pondering the “affinities,” “convergences,” cross-influences, dialogues, and surprising connections between two disciplines, each of which the author has studied assiduously as scholar of literature and former ballet dancer. The result is, quite simply, a tour de force. Jones spins out an interconnecting web of studies that examines not only embodiments of texts and theories, as dancers play out the discourses, concerns, and fascinations of modernism; but also writers’ glimpses of dance as a potential vehicle for modernist aesthetics and, what is more, their adaptation of its choreographic techniques to literary practices that inscribe the body’s movements through time and space in their novels, short stories, plays, and poetry. While none of these theoretical frameworks of analysis is new in and of itself, their combined force in one overarching study of modernism is. Jones’s students at St. Hilda’s College undoubtedly benefit enormously from the interdisciplinary nature of this course of study. So, too, does the field of dance studies, from being taken as serious academic discourse and mode of inquiry; and the field of literary studies, from obtaining a rich and lively mode of parsing texts—one that sets cerebral, disembodied voices from the past moving trippingly down academe’s hallowed halls. Claiming that an unprecedented and reciprocal dialogue existed between literature and dance during the period of modernism (defined loosely by its aesthetic preoccupations), Jones presents her close analyses in a topical format, with each topic parsing a particular hallmark of modernism. The themes she touches upon include modernism’s deep skepticism about (spoken/written) language and growing fascination with the expressive potential of the body; its fastening on rhythm as the root of all the arts; its turn toward interiority (and feminist voices); its reinvention of the primitive and ritualistic; its valuing