Texte remanié de: Thèse de doctorat--Littérature anglaise--Metz, 2003. / Bibliogr. p. 317-331. Index.

Texte remanié de: Proefschrift : Letteren--Leiden, Pays-Bas--Universiteit Leiden, 2004. / Bibliogr. p. 219-233.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: William J. Cloonan, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 7, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 136 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis investigates the representation of femininity within a variety of cultural sources including the earlier novels of Jeanette Winterson and the films of Walt Disney. This juxtaposition parallels images of female development and ego formation bringing to the fore the adolescent heroine's ancient roots in mythology, horror and the fairy story. As a cultural studies project, the thesis deploys the critical techniques of poststructuralism in conjunction with psychoanalysis, feminist theory and film analysis. This is necessary to demonstrate to full potential the heterogeneous quality of the revisioned models of heroinism. My analysis is focused on both popular and literary texts, with Winterson's early fiction in particular selected as a sophisticated and developed example of the ways in which current theory can chart the evolution of a contemporary female literary voice. This thesis carefully scrutinises traditional strategies concerned with literary discourse in order to show how phallocentric structures infiltrate and reflect postcolonial, popular culture. This is achieved through an initial concentration upon mass representation of the female form. This is a necessary analysis as one cannot demonstrate how contemporary women authors revise traditional models of heroinism without first defining what has gone before. Building on the work of Elisabeth Bronfen, this thesis examines how contradictory narratives construct a double opposition, overlapping the dead and the feminine against the living and the masculine, to defend against the knowledge of an incommensurable difference at the origin of life. By representing the narrative of double castration, this is a thorough examination of a movement away from biologically scripted models of castration anxiety, as with Freud, relocating identity at the site of the navel. This enables the subject to move beyond the division of sexuality as presented within patriarchal, heterosexual orthodoxies and to allow for a notion of femininity which is subversive because of its very willingness to explore and inhabit abject/deject states. For the purposes of my investigations, these tradtionally disturbing 'liminalities' will be understood in both psychic and cultural terms, but will focus, in particular on female adolescene. In conclusion, the revisionary heroine marks the dissolution of the certainty once associated with the ancient constructed ideal of femininity. She does not place herself in opposition to the traditional figure, more than that, she surfaces within the broader frame of Western culture as something different, some 'thing' else in the psychoanalytical sense to the 'Other'. My analysis of the figure of the revisionary heroine demonstrates the ways in which both the creation and the interpretation of art and theory can be inflected towards an inversion of the dominant structures of knowledge and power without simply reproducing them.

Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body asks what it means to express love not through language but through the body, where it is felt, challenging the boundaries placed between body and language. Using Winterson’s novel and Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse as points of inquiry, this thesis examines conceptions of love based on heteronormative and romanticized visions of present and healthy bodies. This thesis asks how a body that is diseased and dying can express an emotion that is predicated on these very notions of presence, absence, and health. The narrator of the novel sees love as a scripted story that, once adhered to, determines the (successful) experience of love. Louise’s cancer threatens these scripts of love, as it destroys the narrator’s conception of both love and Louise. Despite the fact that Louise is absent and dying, the narrator begins to write a new story that will allow him/her to have a perfect relationship with Louise, so that s/he can reconcile the contradictions of the scripts that the relationship exposed. Using Slavoj Zizek’s “Melancholy and the Act” and Richard Stamelman’s Lost Beyond Telling as frameworks of mourning and melancholy, the narrator’s melancholy over a lost presence thus emerges as a way that allows him/her to create a perfect love story. To make Louise appear perfect in this perfect love story, the narrator manipulates the language of disease that reconstructs Louise's physical absence as a textual presence. The discourse surrounding Louise thus begins to operate out of the desire to compensate and supplement what is missing; in Louise's case, the narrator is supplementing her with a "normal," healthy body. Looking in the shadows of the narrator’s memories, Written on the Body emerges as not only an account of the narrator’s love story, but also an account of Louise’s story, a story of a body that refuses to be written on and demands to be heard. Winterson demonstrates how the body is always in the process of creating knowledge and meaning that can only be obtained by questioning what is normal, both for the body and for the scripts we all adhere to.

Postmodernity's Search for Postgender: Bropy, Winterson and Place (Abstract) The thesis examines three formally very diverse texts published in 1969, 1993 and 2013 respectively that creatively approach and subvert the gender binary: Brigid Brophy's In Transit, Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body and Vanessa Place's Boycott. Based on Jean-François Lyotard's conception of postmodernism as modernism in a constantly nascent state, the author advances a hypothesis of "postgender." This however does not mean overcoming gender for good (as it is sometimes understood, for example by Rosi Braidotti), but as a structural momentum, a possibility of subversion at the heart of any gender schema and currently therefore of genderism, i.e. the belief that gender is necessarily binary and that aspects of our gender are inherently linked to our sex assigned at birth. Apart from feminist theory and literary criticism, the thesis also touches on the field of transgender studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy of history and most importantly the work of Jacques Derrida. In so doing it tries to articulate the notion of postgender as part and parcel of the condition of postmodernity and a culmination of the modern split of the subject, leading to a certain cultural gender turn during the 1990s. The work nevertheless remains...

Wigging Out, a memoir, chronicles my first chemotherapy treatment which began in 2008 for the autoimmune disease Lupus. The primary focus is on how identity is affected by disability. Each symptom of my disease and side effect from my medications prompted a reevaluation of my identity as I felt a change both in myself and in the way others perceived me. In order to maintain a sense of control, I tried several techniques to pass and cover my disabled status, including the use of prosthetic hair pieces. Ultimately, the use of prosthetics made accepting my situation more difficult as it encouraged holding onto a former identity rather than creating a new one. It was not until I stopped using prosthetics as a form of denial and instead adopted them as part of a new identity that I was finally able to achieve the confidence necessary to fight for my life. / by Jeanette Moffa. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 201?. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

This thesis examines a recent trend in contemporary science and speculative fiction to produce new and/or alternative iterations of reproduction that are not limited by biology, gender, or species. Through Donna Haraway’s notion of “cyborg regeneration” and recent critical and theoretical revisionings of this concept, I investigate this trend in three key texts: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, and Larissa Lai’s long poem “rachel” from her book of poetry Automaton Biographies. Each of these authors offers representations of reproduction that counter gender stereotypes and essentialism and produce new cyborg maternal or explicitly non-maternal figures unbound to patriarchal models of repronormativity and colonialist constructions of the mother. By portraying these nonunitary maternal figures and/or non-reproductive bodies, I argue that these sf texts present new forms of procreation that further feminist conversations about gender, the body, the limits of the human, future populations, and desire.

This thesis utilizes Foucault’s concept of “technologies of the self” to examine three texts from 1980s British literature for the ways that postmodern writers compose the self. The first chapter “Liminality and the Art of Self-Composition” explores the ways in which liminal space and time contributes to the self-composition in J.L. Carr’s hybrid Victorian/postmodern novel A Month in the Country (1980). The chapter on Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) titled “Intertextuality and the Art of Self-Composition” argues that Winterson’s intertextual play enables her protagonist Jeanette to resist the dominance of religious discipline and discourse and compose a more autonomous, artistically oriented self. The third chapter, titled “Spatial Experimentation and the Art of Self-Composition,” examines R.S. Thomas’s collection The Echoes Return Slow (1988), a hybrid text of prose and poetry, arguing that Thomas explores spatial gaps in the text as generative spaces for self-composition.