Author : Elizabeth Berglund Hall
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Electronic
ISBN : WISC:89079564522
Textual Tensions by Elizabeth Berglund Hall Pdf
This dissertation reconsiders Cixous's notion of écriture féminine as a practice of reading as well as writing. I claim that "feminine" readings and writings attempt to disrupt the conventional thought system by exposing tension between traditional and repressed aspects of the discourse. While particular emphasis is placed on the tension between the masculine and the féminine, Cixous claims that the disruption of any binary pair works toward the dissolution of phallogocentrism and its fundamental couple, man/woman. In each of three sections, I pair an analysis of Cixous's theories and fiction with an interpretation of a novel by another author; this structure allows me to examine écriture féminine and to put Cixous's theories into practice by performing what I call a lecture féminine. In the first section, I consider Cixous's notion of "sexual difference" in her work Déluge and in Beckett's trilogy, Molloy, Malone meurt, and L'Innommable. I explore Cixous's claim that sexual difference is not located between men and women, but internally in each man and woman, and I investigate the ways in which Beckett's trilogy echoes Cixous's theories through its interrogation of the binary system of thought, its treatment of the interdependence of writing and the body, and its dissolution of conventional gender categories. In the second section, I investigate the difficult balance between self and other which écriture féminine encourages through analyses of Cixous's Manne and Marie-Claire Blais's L'Insoumise. In each work, I find that the shifting of narrative voices allows for both an exchange with the other and an assertion of a sense of unified self. Finally, in my third section delving into the more abstract binary couple, text and non-text, I examine Cixous's Jours de l'an and Anne Hébert's Le premier jardin. In my analyses, I find that these texts play with the boundaries of fiction and narrative through a contradictory structure which permits multiple interpretations of each of the novels. Ultimately, this dissertation hopes to provide for the reader a new way of understanding écriture féminine as a state of productive tension, and a new way of using Cixous's theories to read and analyze literature.
