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Unbinding the Female Prometheus: L'Écriture féminine in Selected Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Piňosová, Michaela ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
The definition of one's femininity and its reflection in poetic language are two recurring issues examined by contemporary feminist critics. In their works, they consistently challenge the opinion that true poetry is essentially masculine, and that a woman poet is inevitably an inferior poet. Sylvia Plath, whose poetry represents the central subject of this thesis, could hardly be considered an inferior poet. Despite her early death, Plath's poetry continues to be immensely influential, and it tends to be adopted as an example by feminist critics who attempt to define the branch American women's poetry, reaching back to poets such as Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson. From their point of view, Plath's works illustrate the fact that women's poetry has not only its history, but also its language. One may thus discover interesting parallels between the French-based concept of l'écriture féminine and Plath's poetic language. For the representatives of the l'écriture féminine movement Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Western discourse is phallogocentric, i.e. based on the centrality of the phallus as a primary signifier. To disrupt the traditional (masculine) discourse, they neither propose a total split between the "male" and the "female" signifiers nor do they encourage women to...
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