CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Korosi, Marta |
|---|---|
| Title | Body, Subject, Text: (Post)humanisms and Genders in Four Hungarian Autobiographical Texts |
| Summary | The present study analyzes the intricate web of connections between the body, the text, and the construction of subjectivity in four 20th- and 21st-century autobiographical texts, namely, Magda Szabó’s Für Elise (2002), Alaine Polcz’s One Woman in the War: Hungary 1944-1945 (1991), Tibor Noé Kiss’s Incognito (2010), and Laura Spiegelmann’s Precious Little (2008). In modern literate cultures, autobiography as a narrative form has been inextricably linked to the construction of the human subject, and as such, feminist literary history and criticism has also studied various types and manifestations of life writing to examine ways in which the construction of gendered subjectivities is entangled with the (re)constitution of the category of the human. With posthumanist and new materialist accents in theories of subjectivity, there is a growing need and motivation to reexamine the gendered subject of autobiography in order to map the strategies and limits that specify the construction of the category of the human in life narrative, and the ways in which gender as a critical category and a means of identity-construction is invested in the materialization of bodies in terms of these strategies and limits. Autobiography may denote a widely defined framework accommodating variously designed life-writing genres, which have been testing their definitional limits since the beginning of autobiography’s history (Gilmore, Limits 2) in order to try to create a narrative channel for the articulation of their narrators’ subjective life experiences. This articulation brings up a number of issues concerning the representational function of language, and the representability of historical and embodied experience. In the discussion of the autobiographical works selected for this study, I look at these issues as they specifically manifest in the texts, as well as the strategies employed by the authors and their narrators to grapple with the controversies deriving from the autobiographical situation of trying to talk about various senses of “being in the world.” While Szabó uses a fictional doppelgänger to make a parallel-dichotomous construction in which her autobiographical self is developed as a unique but related individual, Polcz’s intent to tell “how things were” is predominantly motivated by a confessional-testimonial ethos, which, however, may be constituted very differently according to which level of interpretation the text is read on. T. N. Kiss’s confession, the thematic organizing principle of which is how to come to terms with a transgendered identity in a particular social-cultural context, suggests that gender is implicated in the human in a variety of ways where both biological and social constructions are bound to be simulatory. Finally, the text (pseudo-)authored and narrated by Laura Spiegelmann constitutes a multilayered drag performance, which, by constantly exposing its own “artificiality,” subverts ideas about the “naturalness” of gender, the construction of autobiographical subjectivity, and their relation to each other. I conclude that autobiography as a specific historical and cultural frame of interpretation and interpellation is also a site where the human as a category is constructed with reference to both the biological and the discursive, in both of which gender as “a term of intelligibility” is deeply implicated. |
| Supervisor | Lukić, Jasmina |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/korosi_marta.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University