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3rd International Congress of Women In A Global World (WGW 2022), İstanbul, Turkey, 03 December 2022, pp.157, (Summary Text)
Vorticism is a London-based avant-garde movement in art and literature of the early 20th century. It was founded by the British critic, author and artist Wyndham Lewis and initially announced in the first issue of the literary magazine, Blast in 1914. Vorticism employs the experimental depiction of an image’s movement, and exalts the motion, energy and dynamism of the wartime machine age. Inspired by Futurism and Cubism, which explicitly excluded women from the canon of visual and textual production, Vorticism is often considered predominantly masculinist in image and literature. Jessica Dismorr (1885-1939), an English writer and painter and one of the two female members of the movement, aparts from becoming merely a formal signatory of “The Radical Vorticist Manifesto,” edited by Lewis in 1914. Dismorr contributed to the movement with her textual and visual representations from its commencement to its demise; however, she was so long neglected and understudied by literary and aesthetic critics. This paper, through an intertextual analysis and with a focus on the feminist and aesthetic perspectives, investigates how the narrative personas in Dismorr’s two prose texts, “London Notes” and “June Night,” from the “Poems and Notes” published in Blast 2 in 1915, and her Vorticist painting, Abstract Composition (1915), which seems to be visually and thematically analogous to her poems, navigate the gendered city spaces and metropolitan culture to critique the exclusion of women. It is also argued that Dismorr’s textual and visual narrators subvert the male centric logic of female exclusion in public by employing vorticist concepts for the feminist purposes, and suggest a feminist approach to urban spaces in which women can gain their autonomy to be free in their own creativity outside of the societal and gender-based expectations and oppressions.