School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
Item'Fleischgeist': subversive tropes of the flesh of 'Woman' and 'Animal' in selected novels by Angela Carter, Marie Darrieussecq and Deborah Levy( 2016)This dissertation offers an ecofeminist exploration of subversive tropes of the flesh in selected novels by Angela Carter, Marie Darrieussecq and Deborah Levy. The aim of this investigation is to discover how patriarchal and carnivorous ideologies can be disrupted through novelistic narrative, which incorporates particular tropes of ‘Woman’ and ‘Animal’. My hypothesis is that subversive tropes of the flesh portrayed in selected novels by Carter, Darrieussecq and Levy trouble the deadly authority of Western culture’s carnophallogocentric logic. That is, the logic underpinning material-semiotic practices that reduce women and nonhuman animals to objects of consumption. My research shows that subversive tropes of the flesh inform a specific narrative strategy found in all three novels examined: a subversive, double-voiced mimicry. It is my contention that Carter, Darrieussecq and Levy apply this form of parodic mimicry to trouble old narratives in new political ways. This study uses theoretical frameworks developed by Luce Irigaray, Mikhaïl Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Mary Russo, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Jacques Derrida, Linda Hutcheon and Matthew Calarco to explore how Carter, Darrieussecq and Levy portray sexist and speciest violence while foregrounding an ethical feminist allegiance to an embodied, relational and contingent aesthetic. Moreover, I consider the way this aesthetic collapses species boundaries by depicting meat as a substance of exposed embodiment and suffering shared by humans and other animals. I conclude this study by suggesting that the narrative experimentations developed by Carter, Darrieussecq and Levy jam the discursive functioning of the carnophallogocentric machine and offer new narrative models for writing beyond the ‘Fleischgeist’. Sleeper, a novella, engages the subversive tropes and narrative techniques examined in my literary-cultural analysis. Sleeper uses the language of carnophallogocentric oppression to stir up practices and politics of gender inequality in an Australian suburban setting. The narrator, Anna, plunges into a world where reality, dreams and hallucinations intermingle to form a landscape of actual and imagined human-animal death. Anna’s fictionalised world takes aim at the so-called authority of carnophallogocentrism.