Challenging Patriarchal Representations: Women's Metafictional Writing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.2218/plurality.10069Keywords:
Subversive literature, Metafiction, Methodologies of story tellingAbstract
In line with Friedman and Fuchs’s understanding of women’s experimental writing, I argue that through the means of metafiction, which subverts the established notions of realism and stresses the constructedness of reality, authors like Acker and Sapphire create room and possibility for women’s radical opposition against established norms of literary patriarchal structures as well as voice a call for their liberation. These works are rooted in the ideas of agency; through the experimental and metafictional form, they assert the writer’s freedom and thus give power to the marginalised feminine.
References
Primary Texts:
Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. Penguin Books, 2017.
Sapphire. Push. Vintage, 2021.
Secondary Texts:
Currie, Mark. Metafiction / Edited and Introduced by Mark Currie. Longman, 1995.
Dagbovie-Mullins, Sika Alaine. “From Living to Eat to Writing to Live: Metaphors of Consumption and Production in Sapphire’s ‘Push.’” African American Review, vol. 44, no. 3, 2011, pp. 435–52, https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2010.0018.
David, Marlo D. “‘I Got Self, Pencil, and Notebook’: Literacy and Maternal Desire in Sapphire’s ‘PUSH.’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 35, no. 1, 2016, pp. 173–99, https://doi.org/10.1353/tsw.2016.0019.
Friedman, Ellen G. and Fuchs, Miriam. "Contexts and Continuities: An Introduction to Women's Experimental Fiction in English". Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction, edited by Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 3-52. https://doi-org.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/10.1515/9781400859948.3
Henderson, Margaret. “Kathy Acker’s Punk Feminism: A Feminism of Cruelty and Excess in More Liberated and Liberal Times.” Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 11, no. 2, 2017, pp. 201–20, https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpw037. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. Second edition., Routledge, 2002. McCaffery, Larry. "The Artists of Hell: Kathy Acker and "Punk" Aesthetics". Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction, edited by Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 215-230. https://doi- org.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/10.1515/9781400859948.215
Michlin, Monica. “Narrative as Empowerment: ‘Push’ and the Signifying on Prior African- American Novels on Incest.” Etudes Anglaises, vol. 59, no. 2, 2006, pp. 170–85.
Muth, Katie R. “Postmodern Fiction as Poststructuralist Theory: Kathy Acker’s ‘Blood and Guts in High School.’” Narrative. Columbus, Ohio, vol. 19, no. 1, 2011, pp. 86–110, https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2011.0000.
Pitchford, Nicola. Tactical Readings : Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. Bucknell University Press, 2002.
Venkatasan, Sathyaraj. “‘Telling Your Story Git You over That River’: AIDS and Scenes of Reading and Writing in Sapphire’s Push.” Journal of Language, Literature and Culture (Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association), vol. 60, no. 2, 2013, pp. 109– 17, https://doi.org/10.1179/2051285613Z.00000000011.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction : the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction / Patricia Waugh. Methuen, 1984.
List of Illustrations:
Fig. 1: Acker, Kathy. “Merida”. Blood and Guts in High School. Penguin Books, 2017. p.14
Fig. 2: Acker, Kathy. “Map 3: The Fairytale Begins”. Blood and Guts in High School. Penguin Books, 2017, p.50-51
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