Kate Atkinson’ın Emotionally Weird Romanında Kimlik ve Metinlerarasılık

Birçok kadın yazar toplumsal cinsiyeti sorgulamak ve baskıcı ve artık çağdaş dünya için geçerli olmayan anlatılardan kurtulmuş kadın karakterler yaratmak için metinlerarası ilişkileri kullanır. Bu makalede Kate Atkinson’ın Emotionally Weird adlı romanı Bakhtin’in roman söyleminde metinlerarası ilişkileri kuramı çerçevesinde incelenmiştir. Emotionally Weird Euphemia Stuart Murray adlı karakterin biyolojik kökenlerini arayışı üzerinden bir kimlik sorunsalı sunar ve bu arayışı önceki edebiyat anlatılarının yeniden yazımlarıyla gerçekleştirilen postmodern romanın kökeni üzerine bir arayışla birleştirir. Bu iki sorgulama sonucunda ortaya evlilik dışı doğmuş, miras kanunlarını alt üst eden gayri meşru bir kadın yazar ortaya çıkar. Postmodern roman da önceki roman söylemleri ile ilişkiler içinde doğmuş, orijinal değil, yeniden yazımlardan oluşan benzer bir illegal söylem olarak sunulur.

Identity and Intertextuality in Kate Atkinson’s Emotionally Weird

Many women writers employ intertextuality to question gender identity and to produce female characters who are free of the narratives that have proven to be violent, oppressive and not viable for the contemporary female experience. In this article, I propose a reading of Kate Atkinson’s 2000 novel, Emotionally Weird in the light of Bakhtin’s argument on intertextuality in novelistic discourse to understand how the novel rewrites the gendered individual. Emotionally Weird combines the quest for a new female character and the investigation of postmodern novel’s relation to previous novelistic discourses. Kate Atkinson stages a quest of identity, crystallized in Euphemia Stuart Murray’s search for her true parentage, which merges with the quest of the paternity of the novel searched through the rewritings of literary traditions. The new woman that emerges when these quests are resolved is an illegitimate woman writer; a bastard born out of wedlock who disrupts the law of inheritance while the postmodern novel is similarly shown as an illegitimate novelistic discourse born out of its dialogism with previous novelistic discourses and other literary forms.

___

  • Atkinson, Kate (1995). Behind the Scenes at the Museum. New York: Picador.
  • Atkinson, Kate (1998). Human Croquet. London: Black Swan.
  • Atkinson, Kate (2000, March 12). “Emotionally Weird? Moi? An Interview with Kim Bunce. The Observer.
  • Atkinson, Kate (2001). Emotionally Weird. London: Black Swan.
  • Atkinson, Kate (2005). Case Histories. London: Black Swan.
  • Bakhtin, Mihail Mihayloviç (1984). Rabelais and His World. trans. Héléne Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
  • Bakhtin, Mihail Mihayloviç (1996). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. ed. Michael Holquist. trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas.
  • Benedict, Helen (2000). “Impurely Academic.” The Women’s Review of Books, 18 (1): 9.
  • Brontë, Charlotte (2006). Jane Eyre. London: Penguin.
  • Brontë, Emily (1995). Wuthering Heights. Oxford: Oxford UP.
  • Cixous, Héléne (1976). “The Laugh of the Medusa”. Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1 (4): 875-893.
  • Dickens, Charles (1996). Great Expectations. London: Penguin.
  • Dickens, Charles (1999). Oliver Twist. Oxford: Oxford UP.
  • Eagleton, Mary (2005). Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Eliot, George (1995). Daniel Deronda. ed Terence Cave. London: Penguin.
  • Eliot, George (1998) Middlemarch. ed. David Carrol. Oxford: Oxford UP.
  • Fielding, Henry (1994). The History of Tom Jones. London: Penguin.
  • Fielding, Henry (1999). Joseph Andrews and Shamela. ed. and introduction by Judith Hawley. London: Penguin.
  • Foakes, Reginald A. (2003). Shakespeare and Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
  • Hume, David (1967). A Treatise of Human Nature: Being and Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. Oxford: Oxford UP.
  • Hutcheon, Linda (1988). Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge.
  • Hutcheon, Linda (1989). Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge.
  • Ibsen, Henrik (1965). A Doll’s House and Other Plays. London: Penguin.
  • Irigaray, Luce (1994). Thinking the Difference for a Peaceful Revolution. trans. Karin Montin. London: The Athlone Press Ltd.
  • James, Henry (1965). “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation” in Henry James: Selected Literary Criticism. ed. Morris Shapira. New York: McGraw-Hill.
  • James, Henry (1965). “The Art of Fiction”. Henry James: Selected Literary Criticism. ed. Morris Shapira. New York: McGraw-Hill.
  • Keating, Peter (1989). The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914. London: Secker & Warburg.
  • Lennox, Charlotte (2006). The Female Quixote. eds. Amanda Gilroy and Wil Verhoeven. London: Penguin.
  • Lukacs, Georg (2006). The Theory of the Novel. trans. Ann Bostock. London: Merlin.
  • Meyer, Sandra (2010). “The Quest for Identity and its Literary Representation through Metanarrative and Metafictional Elements in Kate Atkinson’s Emotionally Weird and Human Croquet.” English Studies 91(4): 443-456.
  • Parla, Jale (2005). Don Kişot’tan Bugüne Roman. İstanbul: İletişim.
  • Rich, Adrienne (1983). “Blood, Bread and Poetry: The Location of the Poet.” The Massachusetts Review 24 (3): 521-540.
  • Robbe-Grillet, Alain (1965). For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove.
  • Robbe-Grillet, Alain (1976). “New Novel, New Novel: Interview with A. Robbe-Grillet by Katherine K. Passias” SubStance. 5 (13): 130-135.
  • Shakespeare, William (1994). The Tempest. ed. John F. Andrews. London: Everyman.
  • Shklovsky, Viktor (2006). “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy” The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Dorothy J. Hale. Malden: Blackwell.
  • Sterne, Lawrence (1996). The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth.
  • Taymor, Julie (2010). The Tempest, Touchstone Pictures.
  • Tolan, Fiona (2009). ““Everyone has left something here”: The Storyteller-Historian in Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scene at the Museum.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 5 (3): 275-290.
  • Watt, Ian (1968). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. London: Penguin.
  • Waugh, Patricia (1984). Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious. Florence: Routledge.