https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ Theses Digitisation: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/research/enlighten/theses/digitisation/ This is a digitised version of the original print thesis. Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Outside of a Logocentric Discourse? The Case of (Post)modern Czech “Women’s” Writing Jan Matonoha Degree: MPhil Form of Study: Research Department of Slavonic Studies School of Modern Languages and Cultures University of Glasgow May 2007 © Jan Matonoha, 2007 ProQuest Number: 10753820 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10753820 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 "GLASGOW UNIVERSITY [LIBRARY: J ivirm i inesis, ja n iviaiununa Abstract This thesis aims to examine the nature of the relationship between the kind of textual politics, here referred to as a “women’s writing”, and the dominant discursive practice of our culture, whose logic and functioning is best encapsulated in the Derridean term “phallogocentrism”. Women’s writing, then, is here defined as that kind of writing which locates itself outside the domain and logic of a phallogocentric discourse, trying to challenge and undermine its hegemonic status. In this respect, women’s writing is not delimited by the sex of an author, but by his/her gendered subjectivity, by his/her position within the discursive formation and his/her attitude to hegemonic language practices. Thus, besides the Czech writers Milada SouSkova, VSra Linhartova, Sylvie Richterova and Daniela Hodrova, the writing of a male author Bohumil Hrabal has been also introduced into the thesis. Women’s writing, as understood in this thesis, a) critically reflects upon the role of language as a decisive medium for our thinking b) questions the notion of subjectivity, which is usually equalled with the Descartean Ego and is conceived as an autonomous and sovereign entity. The authors discussed here are aware that we all are inevitably “inserted” into language. Therefore, they highlight the formative role of language by means of an ironic, palimpsest-like re-writing of conventional literary narratives, as well as by means of textual politics defined by a constant displacement of meaning. The critique of the phallogocentric concept of subjectivity is on the one hand informed by the decentering of the identity of the narrating subject, and on the other by one’s awareness of one’s epistemic situatedness within a particular discursive space. The process of language mediation within women’s writing as I see it takes the form of a radical reassessment of conventional genres such as, for example, autobiography. Within the autobiographical texts discussed here, fragmented topologies of memory provide an ambiguous space for an attempted integration of a discontinuous identity. Women’s writing also highlights the fact that “Otherness” remains unintelligible within the logic and practice of the hegemonic phallogocentric discourse. The logic and economy of women’s writing is determined by the tension between its drive towards non-phallogocentric discourse, and its paradoxical, yet inevitable dependence on symbolic codes and hegemonic discursive practices. The 2 ivirim uicaid, J c tu ivicuununa subversive potential of women’s writing, as understood here, is thus not situated within a space seen as a radical “beyond” or “outside”, but it is directed inwards, into the fissures of the phallogocentric discourse itself. 3 ■v ii —i iii m e d i a , .j c i i i iviciluiiuiici TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract............................................................................................................2 Acknowledgements ......................................................................................... 6 1. Introduction...................................................................................................7 1.1 Nodal points: discourse, subjectivity, text............................................15 1.1.1 The notion of discourse in humanities...........................................15 1.1.2 Dispersion of power. The Foucauldian perspective.......................16 1.1.3 Possible types of enquiry............................................................... 17 1.1.4 Negotiating a language meaning and an individual subjectivity.... 18 1.1.5 The ambivalence of resistance and complicity............................. 20 1.1.6 Textuality of literature and discursive practices ............................ 21 1.2 Phallogocentrism. Phallus, Logos, and writing.....................................23 1.2.1 Phallocentrism............................................................................... 23 1.2.2 Logocentrism................................................................................. 25 1.2.3 Phallogocentrism........................................................................... 26 1.3 Delineation of the body and the construction of gender identities.......28 1.3.1 The gender / sex dichotomy re-written..........................................28 1.3.2 Women’s writing and the body......................................................31 1.3.3 Gendering “women’s writing” and the question of a sexual difference .................................................................................................34 1.3.4 Paradigm of language vs. paradigm of experience...................... 37 1.3.5 The post-structuralist approach to subjectivity.............................. 40 2. Literary text and the concept of women’s writing.......................................42 2.1 A body in plural: Cixous....................................................................... 47 2.2 A woman that cannot be named: Irigaray............................................50 2.3 Interdependencies of Semiotic and Symbolic: Kristeva ...................... 52 2.4 A “woman” in the regime of quotation marks: Derrida......................... 56 3. Destabilising a logocentric discourse: Motifs in writing of five Czech writers 60 3.1 The interplay of signifiers and the instability of the signifying processes 66 3.2 Speaking through silences of discourse...............................................70 3.3 The bodies beyond the skin; the unstable interfaces.......................... 72 3.4 Figures of dispersion and deferral: meaning, identity, subject............74 3.5 The double binds and the irreducible tensions in women’s writing 77 3.6 Otherness: Unintelligibility and beyond................................................78 3.7 The situated perspective and “undiscriminating attention”.................. 79 4. Five Czech authors.....................................................................................81 4.1 Fragmentation and disintegration of the narrative: an ironic gaze from “the bourgeois kitchen”: Milada Souckova.................................................81 4.2 Soliloquies and silences of the intellect, the limits of language and the dispersion of a subject: V6ra Linhartov£....................................................88 4.3 Scattered topologies of memory, discontinuities of an identity and a narrative reconstruction of the Self: Sylvie Richterova.............................. 94 4.4 Palimpsest, polyphony and decentralisation within a text: Daniela Hodrova.................................................................................................... 103 4.5 Male authors, “women’s writing”........................................................ 111 4 iviriin inesis,j o i iividiunuiid 4.6 Fluidity of a non-linear narrative and “undiscriminating attention”: Bohumil Hrabal......................................................................................... 114 5. Conclusion...............................................................................................117 Bibliography.............................................................................................. 121 Primary sources.................................................................................... 121 Secondary literature ..............................................................................122 5 IV irilll U IC 9 I9 , J d l I IVIdlUl IUI Id Acknowledgements My many warm thanks go to Dr. Jan Culik, a supervisor, and Dr. Elwira Grossman, a joint supervisor of this thesis. Most of all I want to thank them for their insightful, critical and thus enormously helpful suggestions and feedback, as well as for their time and support they provided