Woolf, Stein och H.D. genom Lawler som prisma : En diffraktiv läsning av tre texter och tre fotografier

The purpose of the study is to examine how visual art and literature can emerge without enclosed boundaries and properties, and this effect the reading. I’m using the practice of diffraction, reading the images and texts through one another in attending to and responding to details and specificities of relations and differences and how they come to matter. The diffractive methodology I use is based on Donna Haraway’s useful counterpoint to reflection and mirroring. Reading diffractively attends to the relational nature of difference, and maps through agential cuts, where the effects of differences appear. However, I mainly draw my methodological approach on Karen Barads theoretical framework “agential realism”, where entanglements are added to diffraction. Since I choose two different genres I’ve selected texts and images that I believe mutually react to notions of war and violence. Three images are used as prism in my reading of the three texts. I’m using female authors based in Europe between First and Second World War, and an American visual artist active during the War in Afghanistan (2001-2014) and the Iraq War (2003-2011). The images are three photographs by Louise Lawler: WAR IS TERROR, 2001/2003, Still Life (Candle), 2003 and Grieving Mothers (Attachment), 2005 and the texts are Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938), Gertrude Stein’s ”Or More (Or Wars)” (1926) and H.D.’s Trilogy (1944-46). The three chapters are divided into three parts, where each part is a cut.