This study aims to determine how autobiographical processes impact on writing and artistic practices, and analyse the ways in which these processes are interpreted by feminist writers and artists. Issues of representation, performativity, phenomenology, the evaluation of experience in the process of subject construction, new challenging geographies, theories of subjectivity that see the subject as multiple, progressive, interconnected, are the main ideas I discuss in this study as intimately linked to one another in the theorization of contemporary feminist self-representation as a performative act, never transparent, that constitutes subjectivity in the interplay of memory, experience, identity, embodiment, and agency. In doing so I propose a reading of these 'performative acts' through the lens of three recent feminist theories of the subject by Rosi Braidotti, Teresa de Lauretis and Susanna Scarparo, that to a certain extent draw their inspirational power from being themselves inherently autobiographical. The subjects they respectively define as nomadic, eccentric, and elusive all respond to an anti-essentialist notion of the subject's structure that is at once embodied and sexually identified, as they deliberately break across the boundaries of the discourses of criticism, literature, art and theory to meet their own need to disclose and convey memory.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:522033 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Rus, Eva |
| Publisher | University of Birmingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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