Browsing by Publisher "Brill"

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    ‘Remaining Men Together’: A Critique of Modern Experience in Palahniuk’s Fight Club
    (Brill, 2019) Akşehir M.
    The binary of the body and the mind is one of the issues that lie at the heart of the Project of Modernity. While laying the grounds for the Modern World, Descartes also intensified the hierarchical gap between the body and the mind by stressing that the mind is the headstone of existence. The denial of the body and its reception as the inferior half of our human faculties went on and on for centuries turning people into split entities who are alienated to their animal beings and who are metaphorically crippled by the overrating of the mind over the body. Palahniuk’s Fight Club is the modern human’s cry for help, in this respect. It is the dark representation of the split personalities created by this binary which are struggling in the grip of the robotic world of consumerism, capitalism and individualism. In this context, fighting is used as a metaphor for life in the middle of a dead world. Only through fighting and pain one can be exactly sure that s/he is alive. In brief, the aim in this chapter is to show how Palahniuk paradoxically uses the concept of pain as a reminder of being alive and manages to make a striking critique of modern experience through this paradox. © Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014.
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    Making of a Monster: Rewritten Monstrosity in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things
    (Brill, 2019) Genca P.A.
    Rewriting as a strategy has found great resonance in the postmodern movement; it gives a voice to the oppressed, suppressed, and ignored in the target text, but also it enables a reconstruction and a deconstruction of taken-for-granted conceptualisations. In his rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Alasdair Gray presents a female monster of great beauty, Bella, instead of a physically abominable male one. In this respect, Poor Things thematically engages in the creation of a monster; however, the monstrosity of Bella lies not in physical abnormality but in her excessive beauty and sexual appetite. Rewriting is also performed by the characters in the novel, especially in the making of Bella. Each male she encounters commodifies her body to varying degrees. Bella’s body and sexuality, thus, are constantly rewritten by different male characters throughout the novel. This chapter examines Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things in terms of how the female body and sexuality can be the site of monstrosity, and it argues that monstrosity is not an epistemologically and ontologically solid state of being but a discursive construct perpetuated through the male gaze and appropriation. © Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014.
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    Wickedness as a Source of Freedom in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman
    (Brill, 2019) Uygur M.A.
    The extraordinary women, who are strong enough to stand against conventions, have always been represented as evil and wicked in the literary canon. These female characters are labelled as wicked and portrayed from a one-dimensional perspective as purely evil. Various postmodern rewritings of these grand narratives aim to give these female characters voice and retell their stories from a female point of view trying to undo the patriarchal cultural myth that represents these extraordinary women as wicked. In these new versions, the perspective is reversed and the constructed socio-cultural conventions that underlie the representation of these characters as evil is laid bare. Therefore, the formerly evil women are granted a multidimensional representation, and they are, in a way, justified by being portrayed as victims of an oppressive society rather than monstrous characters. John Fowles, too, rewrites the Victorian codes of womanhood through the characterisation of Sarah in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. However, unlike many other contemporary rewriting, in his novel the female character is composed as willingly exposing herself as wicked. Rather than portraying the ‘wicked’ women as victims of a male-dominated society, he prefers to grant wickedness to Sarah as a power position that would grant her freedom from the conventional codes of the Victorian society. In this chapter, it is intended to show how Fowles changes the rewriting strategies that aim to give voice to the marginal women in literature and by doing so how he creates a new version of a feminist rewriting. © Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014.