Transgression, Essentialism and Literary System: an Approach to the Viability of the Female Fantastic
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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 22 (2020) Issue 4 Article 3 Transgression, Essentialism and Literary System: An Approach to the Viability of the Female Fantastic Alfons Gregori Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan (Poland) Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Gregori, Alfons. "Transgression, Essentialism and Literary System: An Approach to the Viability of the Female Fantastic." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 22.4 (2020): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3691> This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field. The above text, published by Purdue University Press ©Purdue University, has been downloaded 0 times as of 03/14/ 21. This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. This is an Open Access journal. This means that it uses a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. Readers may freely read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles. This journal is covered under the CC BY-NC-ND license. UNIVERSITY PRESS <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu> CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb> Purdue University Press ©Purdue University CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles, the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series. Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Volume 22 Issue 4 (December 2020) Article 3 Alfons Gregori, "Transgression, Essentialism and Literary System: An Approach to the Viability of the Female Fantastic" <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol22/iss4/3> Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 22.4 (2020) Special Issue New Perspectives on the Female Fantastic. Ed. David Roas and Patricia Garcia <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol22/iss4/> Abstract: The main aims of this article are firstly to find out whether the concept of “fantastic female” is a contradictory and ambiguous construct, and secondly to challenge the feasibility of applying it to literary studies. The matter of the existence of the “female fantastic” refers to the theoretical approaches made to undertake a double-edged task in the 1970s and 1980s: the conceptualization of a dual scheme establishing a female aesthetic opposed to the dominant patriarchy on the one hand, and on the other, the promotion of non-mimetic narrative modes as formulas for transgressing the patriarchal system. However, the crystallization of dichotomies built on essentialized terms collided with the transgressing function that some narrative fiction performs when occupying marginal positions within the literary system. The main conclusion is that textual features and narrative modes function in some way as devices for a reification of the female body in the cultural sphere. Alfons Gregori, "Transgression, Essentialism and Literary System: page 2 of 11 An Approach to the Viability of the Female Fantastic " CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 22.4 (2020): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol22/iss4/3> Special Issue New Perspectives on the Female Fantastic. Ed. David Roas and Patricia Garcia Alfons GREGORI Transgression, Essentialism and Literary System: An Approach to the Viability of the Female Fantastic Introduction As the author of an article significantly titled “Contra el generolecto: una lectura crítica des del constructivismo” (Against Genderlect: A Critical Constructivist Account, 2007), my stance is clearly at odds with the characterization of any fraction of literature as “female” when dealing with language as the main factor of the analysis. For those not initiated in this sociolinguistic terminology, some explanation is needed here: “genderlect” belongs to the taxonomical implementation of the diastratic description of language, although it has also been applied to certain works on literary studies1. In this respect it has been used to refer to an ensemble of traits that would be typical of only one of the two heteronormative genders, that is, a variety of male or female types of language. In my disapproval of the term, I argued that the concept of genderlect materializes an essentialist viewpoint in the epistemological and methodological sociolinguistic study, or at least it tends towards an essentialism with gender attributes, especially if the use of the term is indiscriminate and scarcely reasoned (Gregori, “Contra el generolecto” 3683). In considering literature as a linguistic verbalization, an important task of scholars working in literary studies is to decide what are the relevant characteristics of the language used in the surveyed works and to examine how to distribute them when creating categories that might prove useful at an epistemological level. The fantastic narrative mode has been one of the most interesting and fruitful creative fields for women since it began with supernatural Gothic fiction in Great Britain. Hitherto, few published academic works have satisfied two pertinent conditions: firstly, to be exclusively concerned with the use of language as a differentiating component in fantastic literature written by women; secondly, to rely on the paradigm of this narrative mode that has become not only the most widespread among scholars of the humanities, but the most precise and pertinent when dealing with the diversity of functions and effects involved in the divergent non-mimetic modes of literature.2 I make reference to David Roas’ approach, which sums up various postulates by outstanding researchers on the fantastic narrative mode that have appeared in recent decades,3thereby offering a psychologist’s view based on the reception of the text within its sociocultural context. In the English translation of his work Behind the Frontiers of the Real4 (2018), Roas defines the fantastic as follows: … the fantastic is built on the conflict that arises from the coexistence of the real and the impossible. The condition of impossibility of the fantastic phenomenon is established, in turn, based on the conception of the real that both characters and receivers share: the impossible is that which … cannot be, that which is inconceivable (inexplicable) according to the said conception of the real. This also determines … one of the basic conditions of the fantastic to work: the necessary setting of the events narrated in a world similar to our own; that is, built based on the idea that we share of the real extratextual world. (24) This clear and succinct definition excludes texts that belong to other narrative modes of the unreal such as literary fairy-tales, surrealism, magical realism, science fiction and anticipation fiction in general from the very concept of the fantastic, which now encompasses or partly includes examples of fantasy, a more usual term whose starting point and most successful form has been the medievalizing of marvellous fiction. 5 In fact, prominent scholars such as Lucie Armitt identify every mode or subgenre that slightly clashes with the mimetic pattern with fantasy, as shown in the following list that she quotes: “utopia, allegory, fable, myth, science fiction, the ghost story, space opera, travelogue, 1 For instance, an early paper of the Catalan researcher Godayol i Nogué printed in 1994 or a present-day publication by Parkhurst (2018) on young adult literacy.