
Gender, Genre, and the Myth of Human Singularity
Tabor(Author)
Peter Lang Verlag
1st Edition
Will be published approx. on 30. August 2013
Book
Hardback
VIII, 162 pages
978-1-4331-1706-0 (ISBN)
Description
In literary works, the law of
genre
- generic boundaries determined by institutions and conventions of art and literature - reacts to threats of impurity. The three significant modernist works addressed herein by James Joyce (
Ulysses
), Virginia Woolf (
Between the Acts
), and Gertrude Stein (
Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights
) break time-honored gender and genre laws, thus challenging the discourses of power. This violation of laws creates a duality in which play/novel and female/male are intertwined. Women behave as men, men as women, plays act as novels, and so forth. In this way they challenge expectations about categorization: literary, social, and otherwise.
Beginning with Joyce and continuing with Woolf and Stein, Gender, Genre, and the Myth of Singularity examines the intersections of these various experiments in hybridity, analyzing and historicizing literary techniques and methodologies - and their consequences. To the extent that postmodernist literature often presents a fragmented and unstable world where reality is multi-interpretive and eschews the primacy of Western cultural systems and norms, these texts are postmodernist in that they do not assert a singular truth.
Aesthetic genre categories may be linked, in more ways than we know, with the messiness and anxiety of forced classification, with racial and gender laws of purity that threatened death for subjects unable to cleanly conform. The cost of not breaking classificatory laws is high. This book addresses the gender-genre law breaking that transcends the rigidity of either term - drama or fiction; it is the transgressive message itself that, ultimately, links these hybridic performances with modernism.
Beginning with Joyce and continuing with Woolf and Stein, Gender, Genre, and the Myth of Singularity examines the intersections of these various experiments in hybridity, analyzing and historicizing literary techniques and methodologies - and their consequences. To the extent that postmodernist literature often presents a fragmented and unstable world where reality is multi-interpretive and eschews the primacy of Western cultural systems and norms, these texts are postmodernist in that they do not assert a singular truth.
Aesthetic genre categories may be linked, in more ways than we know, with the messiness and anxiety of forced classification, with racial and gender laws of purity that threatened death for subjects unable to cleanly conform. The cost of not breaking classificatory laws is high. This book addresses the gender-genre law breaking that transcends the rigidity of either term - drama or fiction; it is the transgressive message itself that, ultimately, links these hybridic performances with modernism.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Dimensions
Height: 231 mm
Width: 155 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
399 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4331-1706-0 (9781433117060)
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
11/2013
300th Edition
Peter Lang Verlag
€72.49
Available for download
Persons
Nicole Tabor, Assistant Professor of English at Moravian College, received her PhD in English from the University of Oregon. She has published articles in
Bijdragen: International Journal in Philosophy and Theology
and
The International Journal of the Humanities
. In the 1990s she served as a member and the development director for Unconditional Theatre Company.