Event overview
Goldsmiths Literature Seminar
Jean Rhys's After Leaving Mr Mackenzie meets many of the criteria Tyrus Miller sets for “late modernist” fiction, yet it has often disturbed critics who view Julia's character as problematic (“financially [and] emotionally dependent” with “little spirit of rebellion”) and constitutive of a semantic field that is antithetical, or at least far-removed, from the laughter that Miller counts as so crucial a feature of this genre. I read the preoccupations in this novel with the mechanical, the repetitive, the grotesque, and with the movement between the animate and inanimate in the light of Judith Butler's argument that to be constituted is not to be determined but is in fact the precondition of agency. I propose that Julia's apparent dependency is a form of politically subversive repetition writing itself against the signifier “woman”. I attempt to trace how such repetition interacts with and is perhaps constituted by self-reflexive laughter in the text, and how, therefore, this feminist strategy is simultaneously a late modernist strategy, and an avant-garde one at that.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 15 Nov 2012 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
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