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Unbeheld Body: Seeking for the Literary Form of the Queer Body in the Novels of Jeanette Winterson
Hlucháňová, Zuzana ; Kolářová, Kateřina (advisor) ; Sokolová, Věra (referee)
The thesis elaborates upon a question which literary techniques Jeanette Winterson applies in her novels The Passion and Written on the Body to portray queer body. The thesis conceptualizes queer body as crystallizing in discontinuous relationships between the categories of sex, gender identity and compulsory heterosexuality within Butlerian heterosexual matrix. The possibility of discontinuous relationships between them - gender disorder - is realised in the act of beholding queer body. Conceptualization of queer body embedded within the Butlerian heterosexual matrix has not been elaborated upon in the full scope of Jeanette Winterson's work. Literary criticism deals with the body in Written on the Body, not, however, in the context of Butlerian model of heterosexual matrix. Articulation of queer body is realized by deconstructive techniques of Jeanette Winterson's writing. These are comprised in the motifs of mirroring in The Passion and palimpsest in Written on the Body. Ontological anxiety in The Passion brings queer body. Magic realism in the novel gives queer body magical skills which make gender disorder possible. Queer body is abject in the novel. In Written on the Body genderless narrator describes queer body as his/her body. It is an adorable and morbid body. The queer body in this novel...
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"A Ball of String Full of Knots": Narrative Strategies in Jeanette Winterson's Early Novels and Their Later Development
Krejčí, Patrik ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to describe the employment of narrative strategies in the novels of Jeanette Winterson with the focus on their development over time. The specific novels to be addressed are: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, Art & Lies, Gut Symmetries and The PowerBook. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit serves as the thematic source for all the other texts, thus determining the sustained concentration on the issues of storytelling, time history. It also contains first narratological experiments, most notably the embedded narratives that are arguably the most crucial of the strategies Winterson utilizes, for they appear in some form in all of her novels. A significant contribution of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry is their historical setting, which accentuates the clash between fantasy (storytelling) and facts (history). Moreover, they introduce a second narrator in order to enrich the texts with an additional perspective and they use the ensuing duality of the narrators to problematize gender. In the last four novels, Winterson reaches the peak of her experimentation, since they take the themes of the previous novels even further, as if exploring what are the limits of storytelling. The complexity of the narrative structures has deepened,...
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Jeanette Winterson`s Postmodern Historical Novels: Sexing the Cherry and The Passion as Historiografic Metafictions.
Araslanova, Anna ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
Nineteenth and early twentieth century theorists believed that history was based on actual facts traced by written evidence which justified those facts` apparent objectivity. Later theorists, under the influence of the poststructuralists` ideas of textuality of reality, doubted those concepts assuming that the historical data cannot be perceived objectively. This led to the further assumption that history is a construct, a discourse created by the historian who narrates it to the others. Consequently, in the Postmodern understanding, history is a subjective rather than an objective concept. Under those fairly new concepts the historical novels evolve into another form, a new kind of "fictional history". According to Linda Hutcheon, this form of Postmodern historical novel can be called historiographic metafiction. She uses that term to describe fiction which is both metafictional and historical: it is a specific form of metafiction that "draws attention to its status as an artefact" in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. Those fictions "situate [themselves] within historical discourse" while still claiming to be fictitious. Thus, they problematize the very distinction between history and fiction by showing the parallels between writing literature and writing...
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Questioning Gender Through the Test of History: the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson and Ali Smith
Burianová, Petra ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
This thesis focuses on the work of two contemporary authors, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson, and their treatment of the concepts of history and gender in their fiction. I argue that, by openly speculating about the nature of time and history, and by making their readers think about the origin of these notions, Smith and Winterson uncover the seemingly stable but, in actuality, very fragile roots of the 'truths' we take for granted. They explore the potentiality of the past, which, in turn opens up the present and the future. To support my argument, I turned to Hayden White and his theory of historiography and Paul Ricoeur's philosophy of time and history. The latter part of the thesis deals with gender, as well as biological sex and sexual orientation, and the way in which Smith and Winterson's texts put into practice Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, and work towards the subversion of gender norms as well as the destabilisation of heteronormativity. Both parts of the thesis are closely connected; history serves to keep the laws that define gender, sex and sexuality intact, and, in turn, these laws are often adhered to solely by the virtue of their historicity. What is more, myth and language are equally exposed to be supporting these norms. The aim of this thesis is to...
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Postmodernity's Search for Postgender: Brophy, Winterson and Place
Peková, Olga ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
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...
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Unbeheld Body: Seeking for the Literary Form of the Queer Body in the Novels of Jeanette Winterson
Hlucháňová, Zuzana ; Kolářová, Kateřina (advisor) ; Sokolová, Věra (referee)
The thesis elaborates upon a question which literary techniques Jeanette Winterson applies in her novels The Passion and Written on the Body to portray queer body. The thesis conceptualizes queer body as crystallizing in discontinuous relationships between the categories of sex, gender identity and compulsory heterosexuality within Butlerian heterosexual matrix. The possibility of discontinuous relationships between them - gender disorder - is realised in the act of beholding queer body. Conceptualization of queer body embedded within the Butlerian heterosexual matrix has not been elaborated upon in the full scope of Jeanette Winterson's work. Literary criticism deals with the body in Written on the Body, not, however, in the context of Butlerian model of heterosexual matrix. Articulation of queer body is realized by deconstructive techniques of Jeanette Winterson's writing. These are comprised in the motifs of mirroring in The Passion and palimpsest in Written on the Body. Ontological anxiety in The Passion brings queer body. Magic realism in the novel gives queer body magical skills which make gender disorder possible. Queer body is abject in the novel. In Written on the Body genderless narrator describes queer body as his/her body. It is an adorable and morbid body. The queer body in this novel...
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