Zhao Feng Ng

Thesis Title: Djuna Barnes: Melancholy, Body, Theodicy

Supervisor: David Dwan & Ankhi Mukherjee

Research Interests: Modernism and the Avant-Garde in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe, Psychoanalysis, Critical Theory and Theology, Narrative and Aesthetic Theory, Body Studies

Doctoral Research: My thesis reads melancholy in the writings of Djuna Barnes as an existential predicament involving two key aspects: i. the Fall and Original Sin (with its secular analogues); ii. a host of corporeal effects and affects from laughing and crying to hybridisation across sex and species difference.  

I relate Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian existential analyses to theories of transference and embodiment in psychoanalysis to reconstruct the psychic structure of melancholy. / In considering the question of theodicy raised in Barnes's work - i.e. is life justified in a world of suffering?

I examine the viability of an aesthetic redemption as a response to melancholy.