essays on the art of angela carter

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Flesh and the mirror : essays on the art of Angela Carter

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Flesh and the mirror : essays on the art of Angela Carter

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Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, Virago, 1994

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Prose: non-fiction , Literature: history & criticism

• Paperback Feb 1, 2008 | 9781844084715 | RRP $45.99 Buy Now

*This distinguished volume of essays commemorates the work of Angela Carter. With a new introduction by Ali Smith

This distinguished volume of essays commemorates the work of Angela Carter. With a new introduction by Ali Smith.

This distinguished volume of essays commemorates the work of Angela Carter. Here her fellow writers, along with an impressive company of critics, disuss the novels, stories and polemics that make her one of the most spellbinding authors of her generation. They trace out the signs of her originality, her daring and her wicked wit, as well as her charm, to produce an indispensable companion to her texts. Contributors are: Guido Almansi, Isobel Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, Elaine Jordan, Ros Kaveney, Hermione Lee, Laura Mulvey, Marc O'Day, Sue Roe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Nicole Ward Jouve, Marina Warner and Kate Webb.

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Essays On The Art Of Angela Carter: Flesh and the Mirror Paperback – 6 Dec. 2007

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Go out and get Carter. Get all her fiction, all her fact.' Ali Smith This distinguished volume of essays commemorates the work of Angela Carter. Here her fellow writers, along with an impressive company of critics, disuss the novels, stories and polemics that make her one of the most spellbinding authors of her generation. They trace out the signs of her originality, her daring and her wicked wit, as well as her charm, to produce an indispensable companion to her texts. Contributors are: Guido Almansi, Isobel Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, Elaine Jordan, Ros Kaveney, Hermione Lee, Laura Mulvey, Marc O'Day, Sue Roe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Nicole Ward Jouve, Marina Warner and Kate Webb.

• Print length 384 pages
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Virago; Revised, Updated ed. edition (6 Dec. 2007)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 184408471X
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• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.85 x 2.21 x 19.84 cm
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Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter Paperback – 1 September 1994

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• Print length 256 pages
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• Language ‏ : ‎ English
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Go out and get Carter. Get all her fiction, all her fact.' Ali Smith

This distinguished volume of essays commemorates the work of Angela Carter. Here her fellow writers, along with an impressive company of critics, disuss the novels, stories and polemics that make her one of the most spellbinding authors of her generation. They trace out the signs of her originality, her daring and her wicked wit, as well as her charm, to produce an indispensable companion to her texts.

Contributors are: Guido Almansi, Isobel Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, Elaine Jordan, Ros Kaveney, Hermione Lee, Laura Mulvey, Marc O'Day, Sue Roe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Nicole Ward Jouve, Marina Warner and Kate Webb.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Angela Carter’s Novels

Analysis of Angela Carter’s Novels

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 13, 2019 • ( 0 )

The search for self and for autonomy is the underlying theme of most of Angela Carter’s ) ( 7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992), fiction. Her protagonists, usually described as bored or in some other way detached from their lives, are thrust into unknown landscapes or embark on picaresque journeys in which they encounter representatives of a vast variety of human experience and suffering. These encountered characters are often grotesques or exaggerated parodies reminiscent of those found in the novels of Charles Dickens or such southern gothic writers as Flannery O’Connor. They also sometimes exhibit the animalistic or supernatural qualities of fairy-tale characters. The protagonists undergo voluntary or, more often, forced submission to their own suppressed desires. By internalizing the insights gained through such submission and vicariously from the experiences of their antagonists and comrades or lovers, the protagonists are then able to garner some control over their own destinies. This narrative structure is borrowed from the classic folktales and fairy tales with which Carter has been closely associated. Carter does not merely retell such tales in modern dress; rather, she probes and twists the ancient stories to illuminate the underlying hierarchical structures of power and dominance, weakness and submission.

In addition to the folkloric influence, Carter draws from a variety of other writers, most notably Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Swift, the Marquis de Sade, and William Blake. The rather literal-minded innocent abroad in a nightmarish wonderland recalls both Alice and Gulliver, and Carter acknowledges, both directly and obliquely, her borrowings from Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). She was also influenced by the Swiftian tool of grotesque parody used in the service of satire. It was through Swiftian glasses that she read Sade. While deploring the depredations on the human condition committed by both the victims and victimizers in Sade’s writings, she interprets these as hyperbolic visions of the actual social situation, and she employs in her novels derivatively descriptive situations for their satiric shock value. Finally, the thematic concerns of Blake’s visionary poetry—the tension between the contrarieties of innocence and experience, rationality and desire—are integral to Carter’s outlook. The energy created by such tension creates the plane on which Carter’s protagonists can live most fully. In Blake’s words and in Carter’s novels, “Energy is Eternal Delight.”

Although Carter’s landscapes range from London in the 1960’s ( The Magic Toyshop , Several Perceptions , Love ) to a postapocalyptic rural England ( Heroes and Villains ), a sometime-in-the-future South America ( The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman ), a United States in which the social fabric is rapidly disintegrating ( The Passion of New Eve ), and London and Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century ( Nights at the Circus ), certain symbolic motifs appear regularly in her novels. Carter is particularly intrigued by the possibilities of roses, wedding dresses, swans, wolves, tigers, bears, vampires, mirrors, tears, and vanilla ice cream. Menacing father figures, prostitute mothers, and a kaleidoscope of circus, fair, and Gypsy folk inhabit most of her landscapes. It is unfair, however, to reduce Carter’s novels to a formulaic mode. She juggles traditional and innovative elements with a sometimes dazzling dexterity and is inevitably a strong storyteller.

The Magic Toyshop

At the opening of The Magic Toyshop, fifteen-yearold Melanie is entranced with her budding sexuality. She dresses up in her absent mother’s wedding gown to dance on the lawn in the moonlight. Overwhelmed by her awakening knowledge and the immensities of possibility that the night offers, she is terrified and climbs back into her room by the childhood route of the apple tree—shredding her mother’s gown in the process. Her return to childhood becomes catastrophic when a telegram arrives announcing the death of Melanie’s parents in a plane crash. Melanie, with her younger brother and sister, is thrust from a safe and comfortable existence into the constricted and terrifying London household of her Uncle Philip Flower, a toy maker of exquisite skill and sadistically warped sensibility. He is a domestic tyrant whose Irish wife, Margaret, was inexplicably struck dumb on her wedding day. The household is also inhabited by Margaret’s two younger brothers, Finn and Francie Jowle; the three siblings form a magic “circle of red people” that is alternately seductive and repulsive to Melanie.

Uncle Philip is a creator of the mechanical. He is obsessed by his private puppet theater, his created world to which he enslaves the entire household. In aligning herself with the Jowle siblings, Melanie asserts her affirmation of life but becomes aware of the thwarted and devious avenues of survival open to the oppressed. The growing, but ambivalent, attraction between her and Finn is premature and manipulated by Uncle Philip. Even the love that holds the siblings together is underlined by a current of incest. Finn is driven to inciting his uncle to murder him in order to effect Philip’s damnation. The crisis arises when Uncle Philip casts Melanie as Leda in a puppet extravaganza. Her symbolic rape by the immense mechanical swan and Finn’s subsequent destruction of the puppet release an orgiastic, yet purifying, energy within the “circle of red people.” The ensuing wrath of Uncle Philip results in the conflagration and destruction of the house. Finn and Melanie are driven out, Adam-and-Eve-like, to face a new world “in a wild surmise.”

In fairy-tale fashion, Melanie is threatened by an evil father figure, protected by the good mother, and rescued by the young hero. Even in this early novel, however, Carter skews and claws at the traditional fabric. The Jowle brothers, grimy, embittered, and twisted by their victimization at the hands of Philip Flower, are as dangerous as they are endangered. They are unable to effect their own freedom. Melanie’s submission to Uncle Philip’s swan catalyzes not only her own rescue but also, indeed, the release of the Jowle siblings. Melanie’s sacrifice breaks the magic spell that held the Jowles imprisoned.

Several Perceptions

Several Perceptions , Carter’s third novel, depends less on such folkloric structure. In this novel, her evocation of the late 1960’s counterculture is so finely detailed that she manages to illuminate the thin line between the idealism and solipsism of that era, without denigrating the former or disguising the latter. The clarity of observation is achieved by viewing the culture through the eyes of Joseph Harker, a classic dropout. He has failed at the university, been dumped by his Jane Austen-reading lover, is disheartened by his job caring for dying old men, despises the contentment of his hippie peers, and, early in the novel, bungles a suicide attempt. Joseph, like his biblical namesake, is a dreamer of dreams: He dreams in the violent images of Vietnam War atrocities, the self-immolation of Buddhist monks, and assassinations. His schizophrenic perceptions are colored by shattered images from the books in his room, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Anne Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1863), by memories of his grandfather, visions of his psychiatrist, the purring of his pregnant cat, Anne Blossom’s custard, and the vanilla ice-cream breasts of Mrs. Boulder.

The novel narrates Joseph’s slow crawl back into the world of the living. Despite a tough-minded acknowledgment of the grubby and quite desolate lives of the characters, the novel is written with a gentle touch and ends on an affirmative note. The Christmas party that takes place at the end of the novel, in which Joseph symbolically reenters society, stands as a classic description of a hippie-generation party, just as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Gatsby’s party stands as the image for the flapper generation. The connected-disconnected flow, the costumes, the easy sexuality, the simple goodwill, the silliness, and the sometimes inspired personal insights are vividly re-created. Carter wrote the novel as this lifestyle was being played out, and it is much to her credit that she succumbed neither to sentimentality nor to parody. Science-fiction novels

Parody and satire are, however, major elements in Carter’s three novels that are often classified as science fiction or science fantasy. In Heroes and Villains, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman , and The Passion of New Eve, Carter’s protagonists dwell in societies that are described in metaphysical iconography. Carter seems to be questioning the nature and values of received reality. Marianne’s world in Heroes and Villains is divided into high-technology enclaves containing Professors, the Soldiers who protect them, and the Workers who serve them. Outside the enclaves, in the semijungle/semicesspool wildernesses, dwell the tribes of nomadic Barbarians and the Out-people, freaks created by nature gone awry. Marianne, the daughter of a Professor, motivated mainly by boredom, escapes from her enclave with Jewel, a young Barbarian chieftain, during a raid.

In The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman , the aging Desiderio narrates his heroic exploits as a young man when he saved his City during the Reality War. Doctor Hoffman besieges the City with mirages generated from his Desire Machines. Sent by the Minister of Determination to kill Doctor Hoffman, Desiderio is initiated into the wonders of desires made manifest, Nebulous Time, and the juggled samples of cracked and broken reality. His guide is Hoffman’s daughter, Albertina, who appears to Desiderio as an androgynous ambassador, a black swan, the young valet of a vampiric count, and finally as his one true love, the emanation of his whole desire.

The United States in The Passion of New Eve is torn apart by racial, class, and sexual conflicts. Evelyn, a young British teacher, travels through this landscape and is re-created. The unconsciously exploitative and disinterestedly sadistic narrator suffers a wild revenge when captured by an Amazon-like community of women. He is castrated, resexed, raped, forcibly wed and mated, and ultimately torn from his wife’s love by a gang of murderous Puritanical boys.

Each of the protagonists of these novels experiences love but seems to be able to achieve wholeness only through the destruction of the loved one. Symbolically, the protagonists seem to consume the otherness of the loved ones, reincorporating these manifest desires back into their whole beings. Each, however, is left alone at the end of the novel.

Symbolic imagery of a harshly violent though rollicking nature threatens to overwhelm these three novels. The parody is at times wildly exaggerated and at times cuts very close to reality (for example, in The Passion of New Eve, the new Eve is incorporated into a polygamous group that closely resembles the so-called Manson family). Although some critics have decried Carter’s heavy reliance on fantasies, visions, and zany exuberance, it is probably these qualities that have appealed to a widening audience. It must also be acknowledged that Carter continued, within her magical realms, to probe and mock the repressive nature of institutionalized relationships and sexual politics.

Nights at the Circus

With Nights at the Circus, Carter wove the diverse threads of her earlier novels into brilliantly realized tapestry. This novel has two protagonists—Fevvers, the Cockney Venus, a winged, six-foot, peroxide-blond aerialist who was found “hatched out of a bloody great egg” on the steps of a benevolent whorehouse (her real name is Sophia), and Jack Walser, an American journalist compiling a series of interviews titled “Great Humbugs of the World,” who joins Colonel Kearney’s circus, the Ludic Game, in order to follow Fevvers and who is “not hatched out, yet . . . his own shell don’t break, yet.” It is 1899, and a New World is about to break forth. The ambivalent, tenuous attraction between Fevvers and Walser is reminiscent of that between Melanie and Finn in The Magic Toyshop or Marianne and Jewel in Heroes and Villains, but it is now mature and more subtly complex. The picaresque journeyings from London to St. Petersburg and across the steppes of Russia recall the travels in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and The Passion of New Eve but are more firmly grounded in historical landscapes. The magic in this novel comes in the blurring between fact and fiction, the intense unbelievability of actual reality and the seductive possibilities of imaginative and dreamlike visions. Are Fevvers’s wings real or contrived? Do the clowns hide behind their makeup and wigs or only become actualized when they don their disguises? As in most Magical Realist fiction, Carter is probing the lines between art and artifice, creation and generation, in a raucous and lush style.

Here, after a long hiatus from the rather bleak apocalyptic visions of her 1970’s novels, in which autonomous selfhood is achieved only through a kind of selfcannibalization of destroyed love, Angela Carter envisions a route to self-affirmation that allows sexual love to exist. With shifting narrative focuses, Carter unfolds the rebirths of Walser and Fevvers through their own and each other’s eyes. Walser’s shells of consciousness are cracked as he becomes a “first-of-May” clown, the waltzing partner to a tigress, the Human Chicken, and, in losing consciousness, an apprentice shaman to a primitive Finno-Urgic tribe. As star of Kearney’s circus, Fevvers is the toast of European capitals: an impregnable, seductive freak, secure in and exploitative of her own singularity. On the interminable train trek through Siberia, she seems to mislay her magnificence and invulnerability. She becomes less a freak and more a woman, but she remains determined to hatch Walser into her New Man. As he had to forgo his socially conditioned consciousness in order to recognize Sophia, however, so she has to allow him to hatch himself. It is as confident seers that Sophia/Fevvers and Jack Walser love at the close of the novel.

Wise Children

The fact that Carter produced only one novel during the last eight years of her life has more to do with the claims made on her time and attention by her son Alexander than the depredations of the cancer that killed her. This was a sore point—her much younger partner, Alexander’s father, did not keep promises he made to take primary responsibility for child care—and some of that soreness is evident in the pages of the satiric comedy Wise Children , in which disowned and abandoned children are extravagantly featured. The story comprises a century-spanning memoir written by Dora Chance, one of the “lucky Chance” twins fathered—but swiftly disowned— by the Shakespearean actor Melchior Hazard in advance of the first of his three marriages.

Dora recalls that the identical Chance twins are indeed lucky, first by virtue of being informally adopted by Melchior’s more colorful but less successful fraternal twin Peregrine, and second by virtue of developing a career as dancers in music halls. (Music halls were Britain’s primary form of vulgar popular entertainment from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II.) It subsequently transpires that Peregrine is the biological father of Melchior’s supposedly legitimate identical twin daughters by his first marriage, Saskia and Imogen. The paternity of the fraternal twins of Melchior’s third marriage, Gareth and Tristan, is never formally disputed, although Dora and her sister Nora cannot help but wonder why it is that one bears a far stronger physical resemblance to Peregrine.

The intricate comparisons and contrasts drawn between the fortunes and pretensions of the legitimate Hazards and the illegitimate Chances mirror and embody the fortunes and pretensions of “legitimate” theater and the music-hall tradition, as both are swallowed up by new media—first by Hollywood films (the most hilarious chapter describes the brief reunion of the Chances with their father on the set of a chaotic film version of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and then by television. The contemporary events that surround Dora’s recollections involve the effects of television game-show host Tristan’s simultaneous sexual involvement with his much older half sister Saskia and the Chances’ protégé Tiffany (significantly nicknamed Our Tiff). The paradoxes of Melchior’s theatrical career are summed up by the juxtaposition of his eventual knighthood with his attachment to the cardboard crown that was the chief legacy he received from his father, also a redoubtable Shakespearean actor.

Although Wise Children is far more sentimental than the bleakly dark fantasies Carter penned while her own marriage was failing in the early 1970’s, it is to some extent a revisitation of their themes. (The revised version of Love, which she prepared while struggling to find the time to write Wise Children, also softens the selfmutilatory aspects of the original, but only slightly.) What Carter’s final novel adds to her jaundiced view of family life, however, is the legacy of her midperiod preoccupation with the processes by which the substance of childhood dreams and unfathomable experiences can be transmuted into high and low art. Beneath the surface of its comic exuberance, Wise Children achieves considerable intensity in its celebration of theatrical magic and its accounts of the redemption of wounded personalities by spirited performances.

Other major works Short fiction : Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces, 1974; The Bloody Chamber, and Other Stories, 1979; Black Venus, 1985 (also known as Saints and Strangers, 1986); American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, 1993; Burning Your Boats, 1995. Screenplays: The Company of Wolves, 1984 (with Neil Jordan; adaptation of her short story); The Magic Toyshop, 1987 (adaptation of her novel). Radio plays: Vampirella, 1976; Come unto These Yellow Sands, 1979; The Company of Wolves, 1980; Puss in Boots, 1982; Come unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays, 1985 (includes previous 4 plays). Nonfiction: The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography, 1978; Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings, 1982; Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings, 1992; Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings, 1997 (also known as Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings, 1998). Translations: The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, 1977; Sleeping Beauty, and Other Favourite Fairy Tales, 1982. Children’s literature: The Donkey Prince, 1970; Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady, 1970; Moonshadow, 1982; Sea-Cat and Dragon King, 2000. edited texts: Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, 1986; The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, 1990 (also known as The Old Wives’ Fairy Tale Book). miscellaneous: The Curious Room: Plays, Film Scripts, and an Opera, 1996.

Bibliography Day, Aidan. Angela Carter: The Rational Glass. New York: Manchester University Press, 1998. Gamble, Sarah. Angela Carter: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. _______. Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Landon, Brooks. “Eve at the End of the World: Sexuality and the Reversal of Expectations in Novels by Joanna Russ, Angela Carter, and Thomas Berger.” In Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, edited by Donald Palumbo. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Lee, Alison. Angela Carter. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Munford, Rebecca, ed. Re-visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Peach, Linden. Angela Carter. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Rubinson, Gregory J. The Fiction of Rushdie, Barnes, Winterson, and Carter: Breaking Cultural and Literary Boundaries in the Work of Four Postmodernists. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005. Sage, Lorna, ed. Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. Smith, Joan. Introduction to Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings, by Angela Carter. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997.

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Angela Carter's «Puss-In-Boots»: Commedia Dell'Arte Meets the Bluebeard Story

2009, Forma Breve

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Throughout centuries the situation of the women has been mythologized as goddesses, mothers, witches and the most common of them; as ‘the angel in the house’. Heading away from the traditional roles of women in society, Angela Carter, a British novelist and short-story writer, shakes the foundation of these traditional myths with the help of pornographic elements of Marquis de Sade; first deconstructs and then reconstructs these myths in The Sadeian Woman which consists of reconstructed versions of the libertine novels of Sade (Justine, Juliette). Sade transforms women into more active figures outside their safe territory which is demarked by the male-dominated society by welcoming sexual freedom and rejecting traditional women myths. Additionally, Carter investigates sexual violence lying at the root of myths and tries to find out why humans need to create and live by these myths, why the violence is directed to women firstly and what kind of a relationship power has with pornography and myths. In order to show her reaction towards the gender myths in phallocentric cultures Carter uses pornography or physical abuse of women by laying sexuality bare in the most obscene and violent way, because to Carter, the mission of pornography is not only demonstrating flesh and fulfilling bodily pleasures but also to give a message including the criticism of myths. In this paper, by analysing the pornographic narration of The Sadeian Woman, the gender myth of women will be reconsidered and re-evaluated through Angela Carter’s extraordinary demonstration and deconstruction of the underlying myths of women characters in the book.

SMART M O V E S J O U R N A L IJELLH

Angela Carter’s texts vehemently attacks the stereotypical notions asserted by the culture with a sturdy intention of deconstructing the collective order of society. There is an excessive use of violence, sexual brutality, pornographic contents and exuberance of female power in Carter’s writing. Makinen addresses Carter as the “avant-garde literary terrorist of feminism” (2) for savagely attacking the cultural stereotypes which is both disturbing and alienating. Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a set of re-structured fairy tales with an obtrusive purpose of altering the formula set by the traditional stories. Carter reassembles the well known fairy tales to an adult version of those tales with a feministic angle to explicate her ideas. According to Patricia Duncker, “for Carter the strength of the tale lies in the fact that it does not sink into the slough of dailiness, rather, it un-fetters the imagination. For the tale interprets rather than presents everyday experience, through ‘a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge’ (Afterward to Fireworks)” (3). But Dunker in her essay, “Re-imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chambers” criticizes the view of Carter by affirming that,

Arıkan, Seda. “Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber: A Feminist Stylistic Approach”, Fırat Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2016, Vol. 26, issue. 2, 117-131.

SEDA ARIKAN

Stylistics, the study of a writer's style, has incorporated various approaches, especially in the last few decades. Therefore, feminist stylistics based on the theories of feminist criticism appears as a significant approach defining " woman " and her place not only in society, but also in language. By examining male domination in society and literary works, feminist stylistics tries to present a counter-image of women both in language and social construction. The tendency of current feminist stylistics mostly focuses on the idea that there is a significant " women's writing and style " that differs from men's. These linguistic and thematic differences that are called " genderlect " or " gendered sentence " in women's writing are the main interest of feminist stylistics. This study will depict the " genderlect " and " gendered " style in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber. Carter's The Bloody Chamber, a collection of rewritten traditional fairy tales, " extracts the latent content from the traditional stories " in Carter's words. Ten stories in the collection handle the topics of marriage, sexuality, gender roles, and female liberty with a subverting point of view. In this article, three stories narrated by female first-person narrators in this collection will be analyzed in terms of lexico-semantic items in the narration, and Carter's style as an example of écriture féminine will be examined with regard to feminist stylistics. Özet Bir yazarın yazın üslubunu inceleyen deyişbilim özellikle son yirmi otuz yıldır çeşitli yaklaşımları bir araya getirmiştir. Bu nedenle, feminist eleştiri üzerine temellenen feminist deyişbilim, kadını ve kadının konumunu sadece toplumda değil dilde de tanımlayan önemli bir yaklaşım olarak ortaya çıkar. Feminist deyişbilim, toplumdaki ve edebi eserlerdeki erkek egemenliğini inceleyerek, hem dil hem de toplum yapılanmasında kadın için bir karşı-imge sunmaya çalışır. Mevcut feminist deyişbilim yaklaşımı, erksel olandan ayrılan önemli bir " kadın yazını ve deyişi " olduğu fikrine yoğunlaşır. Kadın yazınındaki " toplumsal cinsiyet değişkesi " ya da " toplumsal cinsiyetli deyiş " olarak adlandırılan bu dilbilimsel ve tematik farklar feminist deyişbilimin en temel ilgi alanıdır. Bu çalışma, Angela Carter'ın The Bloody Chamber adlı anlatısında " toplumsal cinsiyet değişkesi " ya da " toplumsal cinsiyetli deyiş " i dile getirecektir. Geleneksel masalların yeniden yazıldığı bir derlem olan Carter'ın The Bloody Chamber anlatısı, Carter'ın kendi deyişiyle " geleneksel öykülerdeki gizil içeriği ortaya çıkarır ". Derlemdeki on öykü evlilik, cinsellik, toplumsal cinsiyet ve kadın özgürlüğü konularını düzeni bozan bir bakış açısı ile ele almaktadır. Bu makalede, derlemden seçilmiş, birinci şahıs kadın anlatıcılar tarafından aktarılan üç öykü anlatıdaki sözcük-anlambilimsel öğeler açısından irdelenecek, écriture féminine örneği olarak Carter'ın üslubu feminist deyişbilim bakımından incelenecektir. Anahtar Kelimeler: feminist deyişbilim, Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber, toplumsal cinsiyet değişkesi, toplumsal cinsiyetli deyiş.

Shivani Kshirsagar

The paper seeks to examine the relation of the woman with her body - desire, sexuality, control of her own body - and her "place" within the patriarchal society in Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" from her short story collection of the same name (1979)keeping in mind the context: second wave feminism, and the genre itself: short story that has "extracted the latent content of fairy tales" (Carter), which in this case is Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard".

Lara Bernhardt

SADE'S LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCE IN MODERN EROTIC LITERATURE

Iva Šokičić

ABSTRACT The most prominent erotic literature of the 20th century has been greatly influenced by the works of Marquis de Sade in both philosophical and stylistic aspect, who has left a perennial heritage to all the authors of philosophically inspired, sexually charged works, novels and stories of libertinage and the psyche of a modern individual. The overtly descriptive, „confessional“ narrative, along with lascivious, „pornographic“ depictions of sexuality and libertine philosophy, as its main characteristic and bottom line, has strongly provoked, but also productively initiated numerous debates and controversies on in literary and cultural circles and has never until the present postmodern time, ceased creating new discourses on Sade and Sadeian thought. Apart from the „oversexed“ and overtly erotic literary expression, I shall emphasize the importance of the stream of consciousness in all the authors mentioned, as well as the strong naturalist influence on the literary ars erotica and above all, the essential literary and philosophical feature of all the authors discussed is their extremely avantgarde approach to life and sexuality, explicitly expressed in their literary work, starting with Sade, reflecting on Henry Miller, compared to George Bataille and finally exposed in Pauline Réage as the most explicit representative of the erotic avantgarde scene. George Bataille applied his unique philosophical and psychological thought to his literary work, known as erotica noir, by inscribing Sadeian concepts and descriptions to insinuate sexuality in its pure, natural form, cruel and profane, yet at the same time profound and spiritual as it may be, as a complex unity of sacrilegious and divine, whilst Miller provided us with very similar notions and therefore I shall develop a constructive contemporary comparison between the two authors, based on the expression of their understanding of the very the nature of sexuality described in their works. Moreover, I shall exemplify their strong connection to Sade, whose ambivalent philosophy of pure reason, libertinage and cruelty which can be found in all Bataille's and Miller's, and Réage's works in a form of a rational and existentialist narrative and intro - and retrospective contemplative writing, reaching the world by an inner self experience and I shall also strongly emphasize the sadomasochist writings of Pauline Réage as the first „Sadeian woman“, in Angela Carter's term. The paramount ideas of Sadeian philosophy is best manifested by autobiographical narrative with an overwhelming personal expression, transcending from a descriptive erotic confessional into a most elaborated, yet spontaneous stream of consciousness and an important theoretical frame of Sade's works from various perspectives, from philosophy and literature to feminist theory shall be presented as a guideline to different readings and understandings of Sade's timeless literary and philosophical heritage. KEY WORDS: autobiographical, avantgarde, dark erotica, eroticism, libertine, literature, philosophy, pornography, sexuality, Sade, Sadeian, sadomasochism

Ashley Riggs

Çelik Ekmekçi

ABSTRACT THE PORNOGRAPHIC AND SADOMASOCHISTIC TROPE IN WOMEN’ CASE (THE PRIMARY SOURCES WILL BE ANGELA CARTER’S THE SADEIAN WOMAN AND THE PASSION OF NEW EVE FROM THE HISTORICAL- LITERARY CONTEXT) EKMEKÇİ, Çelik Here in this paper, Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve and The Sadeian Woman will be discussed in terms of Sadomasochistic tropes as primary sources, to reflect sexual abuse of women and their places in literature. Thus, it will basically be pointed out and discussed whether these selected novels contain the elements of pornographic sexual abuse and sadomasochism toward women or not. In order to discuss this historical-literary topic, variety of women studies (novel and theoretical books) and women writers’ essays will be given as secondary sources and references to illuminate the core of the argument in this paper in tandem with the quotations taken from each novel. From literary- historical perspective, women’ place in literary area and their positions will be pointed out briefly, which will be explicated in one to one correspondence with the contents of the target novels written at the last decades of 20th Century. Then, in theoretical session of this study, the sexually-oppressed situation of women and their inferior positions will be explicated thoroughly which is illuminated by male oriented world. Thereby, within the quotations taken by each novels, the purpose of this study is to analyze these theoretical body mentioned above which will be aimed to be discussed here in this paper as the basic literary argument. Key Words: Historical Aspects, Pornographic Literature, Sadism, Women Studies, Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman, The Passion Of New Eve… (INSTRUCTOR) ÇELİK EKMEKÇİ (MA) / GEDİK UNIVERSITY PHD STUDENT (CANDIDATE) IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE AT ISTANBUL AYDIN UNIVERSITY.

Leonor Acosta

Stanislovas Riška

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Angela Carter and the Politics of Intertextuality

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• Rebecca Munford  

Angela Carter’s oeuvre is characterized by its extraordinary range of literary and cultural references. Christina Britzolakis, for example, refers to ‘the voracious and often dizzying intertextuality’ of Carter’s writing (50), while Linden Peach argues that intertextuality is a ‘boldly thematised part of her work’ (4). From fairy tale to French decadence, from medieval literature to Victoriana, and from cookery books to high theory, Carter’s narratives are littered with allusions and references drawn from a wide range of cultural spheres. 1 As Carter herself puts it in an interview with John Haffenden:

I have always used a very wide number of references because of tending to regard all of western Europe as a great scrap-yard from which you can assemble all sorts of new vehicles… bricolage . Basically, all the elements which are available are to do with the margin of the imaginative life, which is in fact what gives reality to our own experience, and in which we measure our own reality. (92)

It is owing to the suggestive image of the scrap-yard from which Carter irreverently loots and hoards that her ‘distinctively magpie-like relation to literary history’ (Britzolakis 50) and iconoclastic approach to canonicity have most often been framed in relation to a postmodern aesthetic. Undoubtedly, Carter’s promiscuous use of citation, appropriation and literary resonance dismantles the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms and unsettles the workings of power, legitimacy and the sacred. In this respect, it shares postmodernism’s challenge to mimetic assumptions about representation by promoting narrative uncertainty, heterogeneity and dispersal.

[M]y fiction is very often a kind of literary criticism, which is something I’ve started to worry about quite a lot. I had spent a long time acquiescing very happily with the Borges idea that books were about books, and then I began to think: if all books are about books, what are the other books about? Where does it all stop? […] Books about books is fun but frivolous. (Angela Carter in interview with John Haffenden)

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Munford, R. (2006). Angela Carter and the Politics of Intertextuality. In: Munford, R. (eds) Re-visiting Angela Carter. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595873_1

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10 rules for reading from someone who does it for a living

Where to read, when to read and why you need a pencil in hand: The Post’s Michael Dirda offers some advice from his years as a critic.

How do you read a book? Like most people, I still decipher the meaning of words printed on sheets of paper bound together, but you may prefer to peer at pixels on a screen or listen through ear buds to a favorite narrator. They are all reading, in my book. Each of us, I think, seeks what the critic Roland Barthes called “the pleasure of the text,” though finding delight in what we read doesn’t necessarily mean a steady diet of romance novels and thrillers. Scholarly works, serious fiction, poetry, a writer’s distinctive prose style — all of these deliver their own kinds of textual pleasure.

As someone who has been lucky enough to earn his living in the rarefied world of book reviewing, I’ve gradually developed reading-related habits as part of my work. Some of them — listed below — may even be similar to yours. At the least, I hope a few of my customary routines and practices will be useful in your own reading life.

Be choosy, but not too choosy

I spend a lot of time, often way too much, dithering about what to read next. A book has to fit my mood or even the season. Spooky stories are for winter, comic novels for spring. What’s more, I like to mix it up, the old with the new, a literary biography this week, a science fiction classic the next. I can adjust my expectations up or down — you don’t read Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” in the same way you read Ian Fleming ’s “Dr. No.” — but the book must be, on some level, exciting. I try to avoid wasting time on anything that leaves me indifferent. As Jesus memorably told the Laodiceans: “Because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”

Editions matter

In my youth, I could read paperbacks printed in tiny type on pages you could see through. No more. These days, I opt for hardcovers whenever possible, if only because they’re generally easier on aging eyes. For classics, I want a good scholarly edition; for translated works, I try to acquire the best English version. This just makes sense. As a reviewer, I often work with a galley or advance reading copy of a forthcoming title, but these are simply tools of the trade. I generally don’t keep them. I want the finished book.

Check the small stuff

Before turning to Chapter 1, I glance at a book’s cover art, check out the author’s dust jacket biography and photo, and read through the back page endorsements. Unlike many people, I pay close attention to copyright dates, introductions, dedications, acknowledgments and bibliographies. All these provide hints to the kind of book one is dealing with.

When to read

Mine is a simple system: I read from morning till bedtime, with breaks for my job, family, meetings with friends, exercise, household chores and periodic review of my life’s greatest blunders. On the days I don’t read, I write. As I say, it’s a simple system. Many people complain that they have no time for books, yet somehow they manage to spend three or more hours a day watching television or scrolling through social media on their phones. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Where to read

Even though I know better, I still read more often than not while sprawled in an overstuffed armchair or on an old couch. You probably do something similar. Not only ergonomically bad, these soft options invite dozing. Realistically, the best place to read is at a table or desk with lots of good light. Other good locations include the public library, an outside table at a coffee shop away from background music and other customers, and the quiet car on the train to New York. In truth, though, don’t expect to find an ideal place to read. Trust me: You never will. Instead, as the Nike slogan says, Just Do It.

Don’t read in a vacuum

To read any book well often requires knowledge of its author, context, history. So I surround myself, when possible or appropriate, with collateral texts to help me better appreciate the writer’s artistry or arguments. These can be biographies, volumes of criticism, competing titles on the same subject or, most basically, other books by the same author. For example, if I’m reading E. Nesbit’s “Five Children and It,” I want to have the sequels, “The Phoenix and the Carpet” and “The Story of the Amulet,” close at hand for possible comparison. This is one justification for building a personal library. I also keep within easy reach a notebook, magnifying glass and Chambers 20th Century Dictionary. Other reference books are shelved near where I type these words.

Attention must be paid

As I read, I do all I can to live up to Henry James’s dictum: “Be one on whom nothing is lost.” This vigilance means that I seldom lose myself in the story, which is the devil’s bargain I made by becoming a professional reviewer. As it is, I track the clues in whodunits and the symbolic events or objects in literary fiction. I note oddities of style, repetitions, possible foreshadowings and anomalies that might be meaningful. I frequently flip back to previous pages to check details. In every way, then, I try to make my first reading as intensive and comprehensive as possible, knowing I may not pass this way again.

Be prepared to take notes

I can’t open a book without a pencil either in my hand or nestled conveniently in that space between my right ear and skull. For a long time, my weapon of choice was a No. 2 Ticonderoga pencil, but it now tends to be a Paper Mate disposable mechanical pencil. As a boy, I took to heart the lessons of Mortimer J. Adler’s essay “How to Mark a Book.” I place two or three vertical lines next to key passages, scribble notes to myself in the margins, sometimes make longer comments on the blank end papers. I never underline words or phrases — this seems too much like sophomoric highlighting, plus it just looks ugly. All these practices serve one end: to keep me actively engaged mentally with the words on the page. For the same reason, I scorn bookmarks: If you can’t remember where you stopped reading, you haven’t been paying close enough attention.

Make some noise

I don’t skim or speed read, though I envy people, like the late Harold Bloom, who can zip through a novel in 20 minutes. When I try to pick up my own reading pace, I end up constantly flogging myself not to slow down. Where’s the fun in that? Woody Allen once said that he’d taken a speed-reading course and had finished “War and Peace” in half an hour; he gathered that it was about Russia. As an exceptionally slow reader, I mentally murmur every word on the page, which allows me to savor the author’s style and to remember what he or she has said. Sometimes I also pause to copy a striking passage into my commonplace book. Here’s a fairly recent example from the poet John Ashbery: “I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word ‘escapist,’ but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough.”

Find a shelf

After finishing a book, I tend to keep it. While not a frequent rereader, I do like to refresh my acquaintance with old favorites, if only by opening one up occasionally to enjoy a page or a passage. When I look at my living room’s bookcases, while sleepily sipping coffee in the morning, I see not only my past laid out before me but also my future: Someday I will read David Cecil’s “Melbourne,” a biography of the Victorian prime minister that was said to be John F. Kennedy’s favorite book. Someday, I will get to — hangs head in shame — Willa Cather’s “The Professor’s House.” Other shelves remind me of the books I want to reread: Angela Carter’s “Nights at the Circus,” Dawn Powell’s “The Locusts Have No King,” Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes.”

Long ago, one of my teachers in high school told me that he didn’t feel right unless he spent at least three hours a day reading. This seemed incredible to me then. Not anymore.

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