Writing Bodies: Isadora Duncan, Movement, and Metaphor

Building on the work of interdisciplinary literary and dance scholars from Frank Kermode to Carrie Preston, this paper attends to depictions of Isadora Duncan appearing in novels, poems, and portraits by modernist writers such as Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, and Gertrude Stein, among others. These diversely experimental texts hold in common a preoccupation with Duncan's perpetual motion, emphasizing shifts in her personal life, choreography, and performance quality over time. “Writing Bodies” theorizes the different expressive roles her image takes on, arguing that the texts use Duncan's image to query the relationship between embodied movement and its literary representations.