Confessional Knowing: A critically queer reading of friendships in the letters and journals of modernist women

AHRC : Katherine Hall : AH/R01275X/1

This project will make use of unique research knowledge and expertise (Gammel) and specialist archive collections within the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre at Ryerson University, including life writing materials such as autobiographical accounts, diaries and letters of figures, in particular Gertrude Stein and Florine Stettheimer. It aims to develop a queer/feminist methodology, through a lens of defamiliarization (Palmer) at the convergence of creative and critical scholarship (Braidotti), to analyse relevant primary texts, from the MLC archive, for moments of knowing about friendships between women within the confessional telling.

The method(s) will then be extended to published confessional material of modernist figures including Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville West, Violet Trefusis, Alice B. Toklas and Colette. The anticipated co-authored outputs are: a conference paper; a research paper (suitable for submission to a leading feminist publication); an account of the methodology; an open source reading list; a creative response to the material and a workshop.