Conference paper
Melancholy monstrosity in Winterson and Shelley: assembling psychoanalytical approaches to melancholy and cultural understandings of object collection to explore the epistemological function of creative praxis
The Strange Bedfellows or Perfect Partners Papers: the refereed proceedings of the 15th Conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, pp.1-8
Australian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) Conference, 15th (Melbourne, Australia, 25-Nov-2010–27-Nov-2010)
Australian Association of Writing Programs
2010
Abstract
In Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson contends that the purpose of the creative artefact is to provide a 'focal point' for memory and desire, principally by wresting language and the body from science's tendency towards objectification, thus returning the body to the sovereignty of poetics. Winterson achieves this 'wresting' courtesy of a Frankenstein-like narrator whose fantastic re-collection of a fragmented body-Louise, the narrator's 'love object' in presence and 'melancholy object' in absence-pieces together her own self-satisfying monster object; and not through the use of science, but through prose poetry. By considering the thematic intersections of Winterson's Written on the Body and Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein in relation to Julia Kristeva's discussion on the function of literary representation as a counterpoise to melancholy, this paper explores narrative practice as 're-collection', a methodology of 'trophying' the bodily object, functioning for both writers and readers as a process of making-meaning in the epistemological rupture associated with such loss.
Details
- Title
- Melancholy monstrosity in Winterson and Shelley: assembling psychoanalytical approaches to melancholy and cultural understandings of object collection to explore the epistemological function of creative praxis
- Authors
- Ross Watkins (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast - Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
- Contributors
- C Cole (Editor)M Frieman (Editor)D L Brien (Editor)
- Publication details
- The Strange Bedfellows or Perfect Partners Papers: the refereed proceedings of the 15th Conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, pp.1-8
- Conference details
- Australian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) Conference, 15th (Melbourne, Australia, 25-Nov-2010–27-Nov-2010)
- Publisher
- Australian Association of Writing Programs
- Date published
- 2010
- Organisation Unit
- School of Business and Creative Industries; School of Creative Industries - Legacy
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99449632302621
- Output Type
- Conference paper
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