Challenging Ideas
Last Laugh of the Medusa: Cixousian Écriture Féminine in Marsha Norman’s ‘Night Mother and Sarah Kane’s Blasted
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nancy Jones
Sarah Kane burst onto the London theatre scene in the mid-1990s with her brutally shocking “in yer face” drama. Kane scorned realistic and formal narrative structure and her onstage dramas and tragically short life meld into a tale that bends toward the hagiographic. Kentucky born playwright Marsha Norman’s ‘night Mother holds firmly to the sort of form that Kane abhorred, containing a unity of time, place, and action. Writing this play in the early 1980s, Norman’s investigation of suicide was a radical thematic choice – especially for a woman. In this paper, I examine these plays (and playwrights) through the lens of French feminist theorist and playwright Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa”, an essay in which Cixous talks about what it means to write (and create) as a woman. Cixous connects the act of writing to the body itself as a physical action, and demands that women put themselves into what they write in a personal way so as to not replicate forms and content that were created and maintained by a patriarchal/male power system. Both Marsha Norman and Sarah Kane adhere to Cixous’s dictum yet take radically different paths to embody her philosophy of écriture féminine. Through a close reading of the texts and their intersectionality with Cixous’s essay, I investigate the nature of women’s writing and how Kane and Norman use form, theme, and character in radically different and not always obvious ways to fuel their projects that embody écriture féminine.
J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello: Ethics and the Law of Genre
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joseph Kronick
Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello was the first of his Australian novels, but Africa has a significant presence in a novel set on four continents, including Antarctica. The novel is not only cosmopolitan in its geographical and cultural settings, but also crosses many generic borders: novel, lecture, essay, philosophical dialogue, parable, and epistles. Finally, the novel most famously addresses what is perhaps the most significant of permeable borders, that between the human and the animal. This “novel,” if that is the right name for Elizabeth Costello, violates what Jacques Derrida has called “the law of genres.” It mixes genres in a manner that not only calls into question authorial responsibility, something that has disturbed readers beginning with Coetzee’s presentation of chapters as academic lectures but displaces responsibility onto modes of writing, or generic forms. The “lessons” that constitute the book are modes for exploring ethical issues regarding the treatment of animals, Western imperialism, the ethics of writing fiction, and the relation of literature to life. Yet these ethical “themes” are dependent upon a series of simple oppositions drawn from nature and history, law and spirit, physis and technē. This paper examines Coetzee’s violation of genres and the willful nonfulfillment of literature’s generic and ethical responsibilities, thereby denaturalizing both literary representation and the ethical order on which it is based. If Coetzee can be said to challenge the ratio-technical order of the west, he does so to expose the insufficiency of a natural order that has always depended upon scientific-technological rationalism.
Text, Time and Movement
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Adrien Pouille
This study examines the journey of the literary text from the local to the global, and argues that it attains a worldly status largely due to how mobile and tuned to the present moment it is. It is often assumed that a literary text becomes worldly when conveying grand and universal truths, but I put forth that its attainment of a universal status relates more to the text's temporal orientation than its reach for thematic universality. Once finely tuned to the characters' present moment, it simultaneously articulates local and global realities generating affective affiliations at the micro and macro level. Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) & Mariama Bâ’s So Long A Letter (1979) are two pertinent illustrations of the idea that the text’s fine representation of its characters' present moment favorably positions it locally and globally. The literary text attains this also because of its capacity to move across cultural and national borders. Without a breath expanding not only across space but also time a literary text may not become worldly, and the global presence of the folktale corroborates this statement. The research then links a literary text’s rise from the status of local to worldly text, and fluid motion between the local and the global to its capacity to capture its characters' present moment and circulate across physical and temporal boundaries.
