Dissertations and Theses @ UNI
Availability
Open Access Thesis
Keywords
Winterson, Jeanette, --1959---Written on the body; Nomads in literature; Academic theses;
Abstract
This study provides an interpretation of the novel Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson in the context of nomadology, a post-modern philosophical project initiated by Gilles Deleuze. My analysis, concentrating on the plot and the narrative strategy of the novel, explores the concept of nomadic subjectivity and demonstrates how it is constructed in the text and how, if at all, it can be challenged. It also examines melancholy and loss, and their role in the formation of nomadic identity. In the novel, Louise is presented as an object of the narrator's desire; she is articulated through the examination and the exploration of her body by the gaze of the narrator. The practice of meaning-assignment inaugurates nomadic discourse and presents the narrator as a nomad. The movement starts on the surface of Louise's body and later goes beyond it, deconstructing the integrity of the corporeal and transforming the gaze into biomedical, that turns the inner space of the body into a visual surface and erases its living matter by the power of representation. The desire to possess Louise's body leads to her objectification by the narrator and challenges his/her status as nomadic. Cancer is one of the central concepts of the novel it represents a trope of nomadic movement and Louise's agency and resistance to the objectification. Cancer transforms Louise's body from overrepresented into unknown and, by producing the distance between the lovers, forces the narrator to resume his/her nomadic movement. The narrator's refusal to recognize the separation from Louise makes him/her take on identification with her and become melancholic. The employment of Judith Butler's analysis of melancholy as a mechanism for ego-formation defines the construction of the nomadic subject in the novel. The constitution of super-ego, represented by Gail Right, causes the emergence of the psychic voice of judgment and makes the narrator recognize his/her objectification of Louise. The breaking of the attachment to Louise enables him/her to gather the first nomadic speed to continue nomadic movement. As a nomad, the narrator encounters Louise again, now as an equal subject, proving the possibility of relationship without objectification.
Year of Submission
2006
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Department of English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Catherine MacGillivray
Second Advisor
Samuel L. Gladden
Third Advisor
Martha J. Reineke
Date Original
2006
Object Description
1 PDF file (84 leaves)
Copyright
©2006 Maria Goltsova
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Goltsova, Maria, "Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson in the Context of Nomadology" (2006). Dissertations and Theses @ UNI. 2757.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/etd/2757
Comments
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