This thesis explores how the celebratory figure of the hysteric as imagined by proponents of écriture féminine is developed and complicated in more recent representations of hysterical female bodies in contemporary women’s writing in French. With the aim of understanding the evolution of the hysteric from a traditionally negative embodiment of patriarchal parameters of femininity to a potentially revolutionary female figure, this thesis undertakes single-chapter studies of the most telling contemporary representations of hysterical bodies. The first chapter focuses on the physicality of Lorette Nobécourt’s writing in La Démangeaison (1994) and La Conversation (1998), and argues that the abject subject matter of the former coupled with the innovative and experimental form and style of the latter constitutes an almost physical performance of ‘madness’. The second chapter focuses on Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996) and argues that Darrieussecq’s hybrid narrator harnesses the anti-establishment carnival force of the hysteric in a shifting and grotesque body which forms the epitome of all that threatens order. The final two chapters focus on anorexia as a contemporary equivalence of Victorian hysteria. The first of these deals with Petite (1994) by Geneviève Brisac and Thornytorinx (2005) by Camille de Peretti and examines how these writers recreate the fragmentation of the anorexic self through a realist, performative ‘rhetoric of anorexia’. The second deals with Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres (2002), Biographie de la faim (2004) and Métaphysique des tubes (2000), and argues that Nothomb privileges a disembodied aesthetic that presents a masculine fantasy of the female body which all but erases the feminine. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to discover how and why selected contemporary female authors choose to engage with – and reject – 1970s models in which writing by women was presented as a means of finding one’s own voice, as well as a platform for politically significant action. It argues that new configurations of the hysteric nevertheless achieve a certain social and political impact.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-216). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This thesis investigates the figure of the cyborg as conceptualised by Donna Haraway in The Cyborg Manifesto (1991). The figure of the cyborg, as a transgressive figure in the late twentieth century within socialist feminist discourse, is problematized with regard to its efficacy as a creature that challenges the constructed nature of gender and contests the boundary between human and machine through its ambiguous nature. Haraway’s notions of the cyborg, which she bases partly on cyborg characters from Science Fiction literature, deny the ocularcentric traditions that have structured gender and the body. Similarly, Haraway does not engage adequately with the figure of the cyborg with regard to situating it historically. This thesis unpacks both the visual and the historical aspects that have structured the cyborg body. By engaging with these concepts, the cyborg emerges as a figure that is identified through visual signifiers of female deviance and pathology. By reading female deviance and pathology on the body of the nineteenth-century hysteric, similarities can be drawn between the hysteric and the cyborg. Through a reading of Alien (1979); Blade Runner (1982); and Star Trek: First Contact (1996) key cyborg texts of the late twentieth century, the figure of the cyborg, and its relation to the deviant pathologised female can be understood when read against the body of the hysteric and how it was visually coded and communicated