IMAGINATION AND DEFORMATION: MONSTROUS MATERNAL PERVERSIONS OF NATURAL REPRODUCTION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND examines the creation in early modern English reproductive, teratological, wonder, and fictional literature of the "monstrous mother"--a female reproductive figure capable of generating both fetal and non-fetal forms of offspring through the power of her imagination. While earlier critics have identified monstrous mothers in early modern English literature--figures who produce grotesque and/or excessive offspring, deny or obstruct nurture, commit infanticide, and sometimes exhibit their own physical deformities--such mothers require offspring to expose their monstrosity. That is, deformed, numerous, starving, sickly, or slain bodies testify to their mothers' monstrous desires, reproductive natures, and parenting practices. In contrast, I argue that monstrous maternity develops independently of the birth of offspring, and specifically, manifests during conception and pregnancy, before women deliver issue that exposes their monstrous maternal inclinations. While monstrous maternal power primarily develops from women's desires, it also remains embodied within conceiving and pregnant women, and thus permits women to generate not only deformed offspring and power, but also new, monstrous forms of generation.While monstrous mothers exercise powerful imaginative force that permits them to produce numerous types of "monstrous births," they also face antagonistic attempts to suppress their monstrous tendencies. Yet the authors of regulatory imagination texts, particularly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century obstetrical manuals, are repeatedly confounded by the monstrous mother's ability to innovate her imaginative influence when confronted with attempts to limit it. Thus, antagonism actually augments monstrous maternal power. Early modern fictional literature depicts the growth and innovation of monstrous maternity even as practitioners, husbands, and communities attempt to suppress it. Fictional works therefore re-theorize regulatory imagination theory, as they persistently underscore the uncontrollable nature of monstrous mothers and monstrous maternal reproduction.

This thesis is centrally concerned with the texts of Jacques Derrida that have addressed directly the theme of sexual difference. Yet to say the thesis is centrally concerned with a philosophy that positions itself clearly as one that deconstructs centrality and its trajectory of return, is to face the crisis or chiasmus of my concern. The thesis is not returned to Derrida. If the question of feminism for Derrida is a question from the margins, from interruptions, of the trace and of la cendre, ashes, the question of sexual difference is primordially and originarily that of the undecidability of the name, signatory, and textual border. She would not have appeared here. Therefore she cannot return. There are two frames to this research that can be recognized in the chapter sequence of the thesis. Initially I develop a preparatory engagement to a questioning of the ontology of sexual difference, with Chapters 2 and 3, with a questioning that broaches the metaphysics of the feminine with respect to the texts of Derrida, Heidegger and Cixous in particular and further engages with Écriture Féminine, Levinas and feminist responses to Heidegger and Levinas. However, this broader questioning is undertaken in order to develop a sharper focus on the writings of Derrida that address Heidegger’s ontological difference, Levinas’s ethics before being, and a more originary questioning of sexual difference. The second frame and predominant focus of the thesis is on Derrida’s approach to the metaphysics of the feminine with four pivotal texts by Derrida from the late 1970s and early 1980s examined in Chapters 4 to 7. Each addresses a questioning of difference and the metaphysical tradition, under difference’s many names: ontological difference, sexual difference, différance, and engages deconstruction’s encounters with Nietzsche & Heidegger (Spurs); the psychoanalysts Abraham & Torok (“Fors”); Levinas (“At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am”) and Hegel (Glas). In bringing together these four texts, my aim is to emphasize the significance of a double deconstructive movement of transgression and restoration, as this research’s politico-ethical acts of writing and reading for an otherwise discourse on sexual difference. This otherwise discourse has always already been produced with phallogocentrism and remains critical for the inventing of thresholds across philosophy, literature and their others. The ashen Preface enkindles a paradigmatic figure as deconstructive trace of sexual difference in writing and reading practices. A Postscript questions the binding to institutional laws constitutive of disciplinary practice while the fiery trace in Derrida’s writing on Kafka’s law concludes on the ash-laden edges of Blanchot’s unavowable work.

This thesis investigates some motifs in the fiction of Québec writer Anne Hébert (1916-2000), largely by exploring interesting affinities with notions in the philosophy of Luce Irigaray (1930-). The main focus is on the young female characters and their way to adulthood in three of Hébert’s books: her first novel, Les chambres de bois (LCB, 1958) and two of her later works, Aurélien, Clara, Mademoiselle et le Lieutenant anglais (AC, 1995) and Est-ce que je te derange ? (ECD, 1998). The study also addresses the situation of the male characters and the difficulties which confront them within a phallocentric order. It is argued that a comparison with features of Irigaray’s thought can shed light both on the emancipatory and the conservative tendencies in the novels. In particular, it is Irigaray’s notion of mimesis that proves to be fruitful for a deeper understanding of the female protagonists in the analysed works, but her specific use of the Oidipus complex, and her vision of a culture of sexual difference, also give important clues for the interpretation of both male and female figures in Herbert’s texts. With regard to LCB, it is shown that it is only when the female protagonist consciously positions herself as a reflection of male desire, as a mimetic figure, that substantial change comes about. In AC the female character is an incarnation of “utopian mimesis” and represents a new order. In ECD the female protagonist functions as a manifestation of a “symptomatic mimesis” and thereby becomes a catalyst for the revelation of the repressed sensibility of the male subject. Irigaray’s reading of the Oidipus complex is used to evince the utopian tendencies in AC, but also to explore how the male characters of all three works are stuck in a denied repetition of their childhood, which leaves little room for change. Irigaray’s vision of a culture of sexual difference provides a comprehensive picture of a place towards which all three novels can be seen to aim.

This thesis is centrally concerned with the texts of Jacques Derrida that have addressed directly the theme of sexual difference. Yet to say the thesis is centrally concerned with a philosophy that positions itself clearly as one that deconstructs centrality and its trajectory of return, is to face the crisis or chiasmus of my concern. The thesis is not returned to Derrida. If the question of feminism for Derrida is a question from the margins, from interruptions, of the trace and of la cendre, ashes, the question of sexual difference is primordially and originarily that of the undecidability of the name, signatory, and textual border. She would not have appeared here. Therefore she cannot return. There are two frames to this research that can be recognized in the chapter sequence of the thesis. Initially I develop a preparatory engagement to a questioning of the ontology of sexual difference, with Chapters 2 and 3, with a questioning that broaches the metaphysics of the feminine with respect to the texts of Derrida, Heidegger and Cixous in particular and further engages with Écriture Féminine, Levinas and feminist responses to Heidegger and Levinas. However, this broader questioning is undertaken in order to develop a sharper focus on the writings of Derrida that address Heidegger’s ontological difference, Levinas’s ethics before being, and a more originary questioning of sexual difference. The second frame and predominant focus of the thesis is on Derrida’s approach to the metaphysics of the feminine with four pivotal texts by Derrida from the late 1970s and early 1980s examined in Chapters 4 to 7. Each addresses a questioning of difference and the metaphysical tradition, under difference’s many names: ontological difference, sexual difference, différance, and engages deconstruction’s encounters with Nietzsche & Heidegger (Spurs); the psychoanalysts Abraham & Torok (“Fors”); Levinas (“At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am”) and Hegel (Glas). In bringing together these four texts, my aim is to emphasize the significance of a double deconstructive movement of transgression and restoration, as this research’s politico-ethical acts of writing and reading for an otherwise discourse on sexual difference. This otherwise discourse has always already been produced with phallogocentrism and remains critical for the inventing of thresholds across philosophy, literature and their others. The ashen Preface enkindles a paradigmatic figure as deconstructive trace of sexual difference in writing and reading practices. A Postscript questions the binding to institutional laws constitutive of disciplinary practice while the fiery trace in Derrida’s writing on Kafka’s law concludes on the ash-laden edges of Blanchot’s unavowable work.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / A partir da interface entre psicanálise e cultura, este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar o debate contemporâneo acerca das noções psicanalíticas de alteridade e diferença sexual, instaurado pelos deslocamentos ocorridos no campo da sexualidade e pelos desafios que estes impõem à psicanálise. Para isso, propõe-se, em um primeiro momento, examinar a teoria freudiana sobre a diferença sexual, o que é realizado principalmente a partir das formulações acerca da sexualidade feminina. Como a construção do complexo de Édipo apresenta-se como uma tentativa de dar conta da constituição da identidade sexual e da diferença no processo de subjetivação, traça-se o trajeto do autor desde as primeiras menções ao Édipo até o encontro com o impasse do feminino, passando pela teoria das identificações como mecanismo privilegiado de assunção sexual. Em seguida, investiga-se o pensamento de Lacan em relação ao tema da diferença sexual, desde o seu retorno ao complexo de Édipo e a sua estruturação em termos de linguagem até as propostas apresentadas em seu último ensino, em que sublinha o aspecto real da sexuação assim como se valoriza a diferença sexual em termos de gozo. Finalmente, tendo como pano de fundo a nova cartografia das sexualidades, e como fio condutor, o diálogo travado entre Judith Butler e Slavoj iek, considera-se em que medida a psicanálise baseia a constituição da alteridade no modelo binário e hierárquico da divisão sexual, contribuindo para a manutenção normativa do sistema sexo-gênero ou em que medida a teoria psicanalítica proporciona um deslocamento da alteridade do modelo de diferença sexual, contribuindo para a sua compreensão enquanto indeterminação e contingência. / This work aims to analyze the current debate about the psychoanalitics concepts of difference and sexual difference introduced by displacements occurring in the field of sexuality and the challenges they impose on psychoanalysis from the interface between psychoanalysis and culture. In order to achieve that it proposes as a beginning to the task to examine the Freudian theory on sexual difference, which the main approach is from the formulations about of female sexuality. Then, it investigates the thinking of Lacan in relation to the issue of sexual difference, since its return to Oedipus complex until the proposals presented in his last work. Finally, taking as background the new cartography of sexualities, and like a thread, the dialog braked between Judith Butler and Slavoj iek, it considers to which extent the psychoanalysis is the base of constitution of the difference in the binary and hierarchical division sexual model, contributing to the normative maintenance of sex-gender system or in which extent psychoanalytic theory provides a displacement of the otherness of the model of sexual difference, contributing to their understanding as indeterminacy and contingency.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / A partir da interface entre psicanálise e cultura, este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar o debate contemporâneo acerca das noções psicanalíticas de alteridade e diferença sexual, instaurado pelos deslocamentos ocorridos no campo da sexualidade e pelos desafios que estes impõem à psicanálise. Para isso, propõe-se, em um primeiro momento, examinar a teoria freudiana sobre a diferença sexual, o que é realizado principalmente a partir das formulações acerca da sexualidade feminina. Como a construção do complexo de Édipo apresenta-se como uma tentativa de dar conta da constituição da identidade sexual e da diferença no processo de subjetivação, traça-se o trajeto do autor desde as primeiras menções ao Édipo até o encontro com o impasse do feminino, passando pela teoria das identificações como mecanismo privilegiado de assunção sexual. Em seguida, investiga-se o pensamento de Lacan em relação ao tema da diferença sexual, desde o seu retorno ao complexo de Édipo e a sua estruturação em termos de linguagem até as propostas apresentadas em seu último ensino, em que sublinha o aspecto real da sexuação assim como se valoriza a diferença sexual em termos de gozo. Finalmente, tendo como pano de fundo a nova cartografia das sexualidades, e como fio condutor, o diálogo travado entre Judith Butler e Slavoj iek, considera-se em que medida a psicanálise baseia a constituição da alteridade no modelo binário e hierárquico da divisão sexual, contribuindo para a manutenção normativa do sistema sexo-gênero ou em que medida a teoria psicanalítica proporciona um deslocamento da alteridade do modelo de diferença sexual, contribuindo para a sua compreensão enquanto indeterminação e contingência. / This work aims to analyze the current debate about the psychoanalitics concepts of difference and sexual difference introduced by displacements occurring in the field of sexuality and the challenges they impose on psychoanalysis from the interface between psychoanalysis and culture. In order to achieve that it proposes as a beginning to the task to examine the Freudian theory on sexual difference, which the main approach is from the formulations about of female sexuality. Then, it investigates the thinking of Lacan in relation to the issue of sexual difference, since its return to Oedipus complex until the proposals presented in his last work. Finally, taking as background the new cartography of sexualities, and like a thread, the dialog braked between Judith Butler and Slavoj iek, it considers to which extent the psychoanalysis is the base of constitution of the difference in the binary and hierarchical division sexual model, contributing to the normative maintenance of sex-gender system or in which extent psychoanalytic theory provides a displacement of the otherness of the model of sexual difference, contributing to their understanding as indeterminacy and contingency.

Notre thèse propose un parcours au sein de l’œuvre de Pascal Quignard. Nous y mettons en évidence les difficultés, pour le critique universitaire, à construire une lecture qui ne soit pas une simple paraphrase de ce qu’écrit Quignard. L’écrivain, en effet, commente ce qu’il écrit et met, lui-même, en perspective tout ce qu’il publie. Notre lecture de Quignard n’est pas une approche érudite de l’œuvre de l’écrivain, elle est guidée par le souci de donner à lire les effets produits par les textes. Dans un premier temps, nous nous intéressons à l’articulation entre écriture et souffrance, le fait d’écrire est présenté comme un geste de survie qui permet de métamorphoser l’existence de l’auteur. Nous montrons comment des moments vécus par l’auteur sont sans cesse repris dans ses textes et structurent la construction de l’œuvre. Dans un deuxième temps, nous tentons de cerner la cosmogonie que met en place Quignard, il décrit les lois du vivant qui conditionnent notre rapport à la vie et à la sexualité. La différence sexuelle est présentée comme un absolu qui vient couper l’humanité en deux. Hommes et femmes sont fondamentalement différents pour Quignard, il consacre de nombreuses pages à expliquer la nature de cette différence. Nous essayons ensuite de comprendre la place de l’amour dans l’œuvre de l’auteur, l’amour apparaît comme une fusion qui permet aux individus de dépasser leurs propres limites. L’amour est aussi l’occasion de retrouvailles avec des sensations prénatales ; la mère, aimée et haïe, est une figure centrale de l’œuvre de Pascal Quignard. / In our thesis we suggest a journey inside the works of Pascal Quignard. We bring to the fore the difficulties, for an academic critic, to build a reading that is not a simple paraphrase of what Quignard writes. The writer actually comments what he writes and give himself angles to everything he publishes. Our reading of Quignard is not an erudite approch of his works, it is willing to show some effects produced by the texts. In the first part, we take an interest in the articulation between writing and suffering. To write is presented as a survival gesture that allows a metamorphosis of the writer’s life. We show how moments lived by the author are constantly take up again in his texts and how they structure the construction of the works. In the second part, we try to grasp the cosmogony that Quignard creates, he describes the laws of life that conditions our relationship to life and sexuality. Sexual difference is presented as an absolute that cuts humanity in two. Men and women are fundamentally different according to Quignard, he devotes many pages to explain the nature of this difference. Finally, we try to understand the status of love in the works of Quignard, love appears to be a fusion that allows individuals to exceed their own limits. Love is a way to feel again antenatal sensations; the mother, loved and hated, is a key figure in the works of Pascal Quignard.

Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / "Material Minds and Modern Fiction" examines how modern women writers adapt discourses from experimental psychology in their fiction to confront the politicized issue of psychological sexual difference. Debates regarding the concept of the “gendered brain” were fundamental to the early twentieth-century women’s movement in Great Britain and the United States: defenders of the anti-suffrage and antifeminist position used the supposedly inherent differences between men and women’s brains to justify the denial of rights, whereas equality feminists insisted on the innate sameness of the human mind to bolster their claim to equal sociopolitical access. My dissertation attests that Rebecca West, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf draw on experimental-psychological theory in their literary works in a way that unsettles the premises of this debate, developing literary discourses that acknowledge psychological disparities between men and women without conceding to gender essentialism. Emerging at the end of the nineteenth century, experimental psychology was a disciplinary approach to psychological study that theorized cognition as a physiological process to be studied using the empiricist methodology of the natural sciences. The material mind—the idea that the human mind is no more or less than the human brain—was a foundational concept in the field. Employing an interdisciplinary method, my dissertation shows that experimental-psychological theory enabled modern women authors to approach the issue of gendered brains from a materialist perspective that maintained the equality-feminist claim to parity. West, Stein, and Woolf draw on diverse strands of experimental-psychological thought to craft distinctive aesthetic strategies that position sexual difference as the product of inequitable environmental exposures or social conditioning rather than an immutable feature of psychic life. My project testifies to the prominence of experimental-psychological theory in the modern era as well as the diversity of psychological schools that fall within its rubric. A recovery project of sorts, my chapters position the theories offered by modern experimental-psychological researchers as inextricably bound to expressions of feminism in modern fiction, serving as adaptable discourses for women writers seeking to use their literary medium to deconstruct the ideology of gender essentialism. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

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京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(理学) / 甲第23743号 / 理博第4833号 / 新制||理||1691(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院理学研究科生物科学専攻 / (主査)教授 酒井 章子, 准教授 本庄 三恵, 教授 松下 智直 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Science / Kyoto University / DGAM