“Desire to Capture, Desire to Expose: The Scrapbook of H.D.,” by Caroline Sydney, Y2016, written for Professor Laura Wexler’s Photography and Memory seminar, fall 2014.

Essay Summary: The album of imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) illustrates the tension between the personal and the classical so present in its creator’s writing. This essay explores the relationship between H.D.’s collages, her poetry, Derrida’s Athens, Still Remains and Freud’s Delusion and Dream. Working in tandem, these sources delineate the female figure of antiquity and the redefinition of that form and role in H.D.’s hands.

READ the essay: “Desire to Capture, Desire to Expose: The Scrapbook of H.D.,” by Caroline Sydney, Y2016

Image: detail from H. D.’s scrapbook (see more images: H. D. Scrapbook); H. D. Papers

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