School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemSubjective renewals: tropes of the archaeological body in the verse novels of Anne Carson and Dorothy Porter & Sonqoqui: a verse novel( 2014)This study offers a feminist reading of the ways in which the verse novels of Anne Carson and Dorothy Porter have embraced new possibilities for linguistic experiment. My hypothesis is that literary experimentation within these writers’ contemporary verse novels produces new ways for thinking through, and beyond, sacrificial models of subjectivity. My principal research question contends that tropes of the archaeological body serve as a common heuristic device by which Porter and Carson construct both narrative and poetic vocalisation in their texts. I further argue that this vocalisation is polyphonic. My research suggests that these polyphonic tropes excavate and critique images of sacrifice in specific ways. Moreover, this study explores the interplay of poetic and fictional innovation evidenced in Porter’s and Carson’s respective verse novels. I propose that this interplay serves to produce dynamic representations of Kristevan 'revolt' or renewed subjectivity. These findings suggest that Porter’s and Carson’s verse novels simultaneously resist, or subvert, the sacrificial models of subjectivity on which Irigaray, for example, argues that liberal capitalist economies are built. I argue that the verse novels of Anne Carson and Dorothy Porter critique such economies as they also critique postmodernist representations of subjectivity. These writers’ literary excavations draw on an archaeological imaginary to question repressive notions of sexual difference, thus also critiquing representations of figurative heroism and sacrifice in recent and historical verse novel developments. Influenced by these writers’ polyphonic and poetic narrative techniques, my creative work, Sonqoqui, experiments with the formal possibilities of the verse novel and also deals directly with themes of sacrifice. Inspired by the archaeological discovery of three naturally preserved five-hundred-year-old Inca child mummies in 1999, this creative work draws on an archaeological imaginary to explore the touch of the past on textual subjectivities in flux and motion. Deploying a poetic, and in some cases, typographic, use of weft and warp, this tri-partite creative work produces embodied poetic polyphonies across a textured narrative space. Sonqoqui thus aims to enhance material configurations of ‘revolt’, exploring and representing historical tropes of gendered embodiment via non-sacrificial modes as a way of eschewing monological discourse.