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The article examines the representation of transvestism and abject body in Jeanette Winterson's "The Passion." It discusses the androgyny of the protagonist Villanelle and her transvestism as an exploration of sex-construction and gender performativity. It explores the feminist struggle and female empowerment in the novel, as well as parental influence in Villanelle's subjectivity development, the presentation of masculinized self, and conflict of interest with the feminine-homosexual self.

Copyright of Journal of Social Sciences Institute / Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi is the property of Bingol University / Rectorate and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The future is the only form of temporal experience which requires us to use our speculative and imaginative capacities. However, due to the concurrent global challenges of the twenty-first century (COVID-19, populism and nationalism, climate crisis), imagining viable future scenarios for the human has become increasingly difficult. As a result, our Enlightenment conception of temporality as linear has become futile and requires an alternative approach. This article explores how two examples of contemporary English fiction, Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me and Jeanette Winterson's Frankissstein, experiment with temporally marked forms to construct narratives in which the separation into past, present, and future becomes indistinguishable. The technological imagination of these narratives, in the shape of accelerated scientific progress in artificial intelligence and transcendent consciousness, produces alternative histories in the hopes of modeling a new sense of futurity. In doing so, McEwan's and Winterson's novels assimilate binaries such as antiquitas and modernitas, human and post-human, and ultimately past, present, and future to showcase the productive potential of speculative formalism (Eyers). I argue that such a modeling of 'co-temporality' (Ruffel) places the contemporary novel's capacity for cultural inquiry on the same epistemological level as that for scientific inquiry, enabling a conception of futurity detached from temporal linearity and the logic of progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay addresses its title question by analyzing sex robots, real and imagined, as both representational objects and vital matter. Though frequently treated as perverse by popular media, actual sex robots are in fact remarkably conventional in their reproduction of a heteronormative sexual aesthetic that disavows the vibrancy of the sexualized object. Sex robot art and fictional narratives (both film and literature), including Jordan Wolfson's installation Female Figure (2014), Alex Garland's Ex Machina (2014), and Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (2007), employ and interrogate this kind of mimetic design. In these texts, sex robots assert their vibrancy and agency via what Sarah Ahmed terms "queer use," while at the same time reinscribing the humanist hierarchies that precluded their vitality in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With an air of twenty-first-century cosmopolitanism, Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook (2000) spans countries and centuries in an endlessly shifting narrative that formally mirrors the settings' and characters' kaleidoscopic identities. Immersed in the Internet's opportunities for transformation and switching between cities and the Internet as sites of global circulations and cosmopolitan encounters, The PowerBook takes globalization's redefinition of location further to juxtapose meatspace and cyberspace and establish an imagined transterritorial, transtemporal community. Using the rapidly growing body of cosmopolitan theory with a tinge of geocriticism, this essay aims at analyzing the novel's conceptions of meatspace and cyberspace, its independence of location, its focus on community as being-in-common, and the ever-changing cellular narrative structure typical of what Berthold Schoene calls a new cosmopolitan modus operandi for British fiction (97). The article wishes to show that, despite Winterson's exploration of privileged forms of existence, The PowerBook is a political cosmopolitan fiction on place, space, identity, community, and love as a recurrent trope of "cosmopolitan empathy" (McCulloch 10). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article literary criticism of Jeanette Winterson's novel "The Gap of Time," which is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series. It discusses about aiming to adapt William Shakespeare's works into contemporary fiction; examines how Winterson's adaptation of "The Winter's Tale" queers both the content, by exploring queer relationships and identities; and Winterson's approach within the context of the larger Hogarth Shakespeare project and her personal connection to the play.

Copyright of Journal of Cultural Studies / Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of Journal of Cultural Studies / Kultur Arastirmalari Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The conflict between humans and creatures considered non-humans is a major part of a particular trend in twenty-first-century dystopian novels written by women published in English. In these novels, storytelling is used to push on the boundaries of what being human means and therefore the ways humans live. The future in these dystopian scenarios is filled with spaces for resistance, community values and proposals for new ways of living. But to carve out these new worlds, a discussion on what is human and what is not precedes to show that any new form society may take needs to challenge the assumptions of our present day world. In the selected novels, that include Ursula Le Guin's The Telling, Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods, and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam, when those initially considered non-humans tell stories, they are perceived as humans. However, instead of integrating the previous human culture and reproducing its practices, these new humans propose other forms of humanity with other social arrangements, beliefs, gender configurations, and culture. They point to how humanity is a plural and open concept, not a restrictive ideal, and on the ways we can envision possible futures once a more plural meaning of the word human prevails. Throughout the article I discuss briefly the traditional humanist view on humanity, how it appears on dystopian fiction and how it is challenged, the many ways these ideas are present in the corpus selected and how they are explored and blurred. Finally, I divide the selected novels into three groups according to how the meaning of storytelling in the text challenges the notion of human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (2007) in light of human and nonhuman relationships. The author presents us with quite a paradoxical situation, whereby what is human seems to be less human than what is said to be nonhuman. The ontological instability produced by such a peculiar paradigm generates interesting consequences in terms of fundamental rights, especially when applied to hybrid forms of life such as those represented by "Robo sapiens." Hence, Winterson's novel invites a reconfiguration of the notion of rights and "legal personhood" in the context of AI systems. Robots demand that their "humanity" is acknowledged and, as a consequence to that, they also demand that they are granted rights. One could notice that Robot's existential condition is very similar to that of slaves, precisely like slaves they are submitted to servitude, forced or bonded labour. And yet the fact that they are not "fully human", only very similar or close to them, puts robots in a juridical position that might be compared to that of animals and the way they are presented in animal law studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeanette Winterson's latest novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019), was written as a contribution to the world-wide celebrations of the second centenary of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Evincing the characteristic excessiveness and parodic stance of the postmodern romance, it alternates two interlocked story lines. The first, narrated by Mary Shelley, is situated during her own life span and populated by Mary herself, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John William Polidori and Claire Clairmont. The second, situated in 2018, is narrated by Dr Ry Shelley, a transgender medical doctor who sells body parts to Prof. Victor Stein, a cutting-edge researcher in Artificial Intelligence. The essay argues that for all its parodic doubleness, temporal circularity, thematic enmeshment and palimpsestic structure, the novel draws a clear-cut distinction between the Idealist conception of subjectivity endorsed by the male Romantic poets that leads to Prof. Stein's transmodern conception of a future universe colonised by bodiless enhanced humans, and Mary Shelley's affectively charged conception of embodied subjectivity that foreruns Ry Shelley's posthuman conception of fluid subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Jeanette Winterson's work to illustrate how art can hold a transformative and therapeutic potential. It presents the argument that by stimulating imagination and conveying a sense of contingency, art functions as a counterforce to several potentially harmful aspects of contemporary society, such as the uncritical belief in science and technological progress, excessive consumption, and blind pursuit of profit, most of which result from prevailing egocentric attitudes. To explore the potential of art to foster opposing values and encourage the transcendence of the ego, the article analyses novels of Jeanette Winterson, all of which portray imaginative worlds challenging conventional patterns of thought and foregrounding alternative ways of perception. The article examines both the role that Winterson ascribes to art by addressing the issue in her texts, and how she herself fulfils the potential of art in the work she produces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Jeanette Winterson's Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019) draws analogies to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), which is a protocyberpunk novel. The postmodern novel interweaves Mary Shelley's writing of Frankenstein in Switzerland and transgender Ry Shelley's acquaintance with artificial intelligence in Britain. Frankissstein also connects the tale of the Titan Prometheus, Professor Victor Frankenstein creating a cyborg in Frankenstein and Ry's beloved, Victor Stein, experimenting on cyborgs with artificial intelligence. Thus, the novel's narrative switches between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries to depict the posthuman condition over the centuries. What it means to be human, the validity of grand narratives and all kinds of binarism are put into question throughout Frankissstein as a postmodern extension of the nineteenth-century novel Frankenstein. The paper argues that the novel provides insights into the posthuman condition through technocultural discourses. A posthumanist reading of the novel indicates that Frankissstein contributes to the deconstruction of anthropocentric binaries in humanist thinking regarding the relationship between not only humans and nonhumans but also men and women. The study also reveals that despite the time lapse, the concerns related to the posthuman condition remain the same because transgressing dichotomies lead to ambiguity in human's life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of RumeliDE Journal of Language & Literature Research / RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of RumeliDE Uluslararasi Hakemli Dil & Edebiyat Arastirmalari Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Historically, both the male and the medical gaze have sexualized and pathologized the female anatomy. Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body simultaneously perpetuates and problematizes the alliance between patriarchy and science that objectifies and disempowers women and their own stories. Her novel's genderless narrator first eroticizes her/his beloved Louise and later abandons her because she suffers with leukemia, leaving her in the hands of her husband-doctor, a man whom she no longer loves or trusts. Under the umbrella of medical humanities, this essay explores how Winterson's narrator dehumanizes and silences Louise by becoming the anatomist of her cancer to possess her entirely from afar and to mourn the loss of access to her sexual body; vicariously experiencing leukemia through storytelling, and thus depriving Louise of her right to make choices in her life, the comforting presence of the person she loves by her side, and the therapy of narrating her own account about terminal illness on the look of death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frankissstein: A Love Story, Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel, is a mirror transposition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The novel adumbrates a posthuman or transhuman life to be lived «forever as brain emulation» thanks to artificial Intelligence. Scientist Victor Stein argues that we can develop our brain software through learning, including outsourcing to machines, until we learn to share the planet with «non-biological forms created by us». This delineates a world in which the cyborgification (the fusion of nature and culture/technology) is seen as inevitable and there is no need to ‘defend’ nature. With further lines of thought, my paper explores the metaphorical fields (parallel worlds, simulacra) and narrative devices (metalepsis, alternating montage, internal parallelism) that underpin this story. My point is that the attempted fusion of nature and technology, as theorised by technoscientists in Winterson’s story, only produces a modification in the attitude of some unaugmented humans towards other unaugmented humans, both living and dead. Finally, humans are not cyborgs, nor inforgs, nor full-blown transhumans but boundary creatures straddling alternative ontologies and often acting as less than humans, infrahumans or, like transsexual Ry Shelley, «inappropriate/d others». [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Jeanette Winterson's The Passion (1987) employs the past to examine the present and explores the role of love in Thatcherism. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), it proposes that Winterson opposes the passions that defined the decade—Thatcherite love of nation and money—with feminist and queer reconceptions of love based on connection, community, and otherness. By showing how the novel's critique of Thatcherism intersects with critiques of heteropatriarchy, the essay challenges the view that Winterson's fiction privileges matters of the heart over social and political issues. Anticipating Ahmed's analysis, Winterson demonstrates that, while love often sustains inequality and injustice, love reconceived has the potential to reshape the world—a theme that becomes central to her later work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson are two canonical writers participating in a 'literary slipstream' through their ventures into science fiction, creating crossover texts that confuse the boundaries between the literary and the popular. This interface is exemplified through the awards received by these writers, which help to bring literary credibility and integrity to the genre. Atwood's first speculative novel, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), went on to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was nominated for a Nebula award and the Booker Prize, whilst her MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2015) was followed by the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society in 2015. Winterson was awarded an OBE for her services to literature in the same year that she published The Stone Gods (2006), whilst her most recent novel Frankisstein (2019) was longlisted for the Booker Prize. This article explores the extent to which distinctions between the popular and the literary are reliant upon notions of inferiority and superiority, and the problematics of a desire to frame genre fiction according to perceived notions of literary value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interaction between text and reader is a prominent concern in stylistics. This paper focusses on interactions among stylistic processes and subconscious microcognitive processes that generate changes to narrative and interpretation during reading. Drawing on process philosophy and recent neuroscientific research, I articulate this dynamism through analysis of a brief narrative moment from each of The.PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. I argue that high densities of stylistic and microcognitive perturbations lead to frequent narrative and interpretive changes in the two moments. The analyses reinforce portrayals of reading as intensely complex, dynamic and changeable. Complexity, dynamism and mutability also characterise the stylistic changes in the two narrative moments. This paper advocates greater attention to the role of volatile stylistic and cognitive microdynamics in shaping the reading of prose fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cyclical nature of the human experience has been widely discussed through the cynical mind-set of the postmodern era. Jeanette Winterson's 2007 novel, The Stone Gods, stands out as one of the texts that revolve around this pessimistic discussion concerning the cyclical and repetitive nature of the human condition and history. Besides the implication of this never-ending cycle of the human experience as part of the action of the narrative, the repeating appearance of the certain parts of an old book throughout the narrative also resonates the fact that history as a narrative keeps repeating itself. In this respect, the circular or rather spiral nature of historical progress is highlighted through a fictional intertextuality. Winterson's novel also epitomizes the Deleuzean control society and various forms of violence as the central concept around which the repeating pattern of human behaviour revolves. In this context, the article aims to discuss how control and violence as the central concepts of the novel are represented in a variety of ways, ranging from the anthropocentric violence that is directed towards nature, to systemic violence that the individuals are subjected to by institutional structures in the light of Nietzsche's argument on the immanent violence of human nature and his concepts of will to power and the overman, which is exceptionally represented as the artificial intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Angles: French Perspectives on the Anglophone World is the property of Societe des Anglicistes de l Enseignement Superieur and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Fe Journal: Feminist Critique / Fe Dergi: Feminist Elestiri is the property of Ankara University, Women's Studies Center (KASAUM) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay seeks to trace and investigate ecologically inflected concepts in Jeanette Winterson's Art & Lies. The general tendency in ecological and ecocritical analyses has long been a selective focus on how nature is represented in literary texts; however, the ecological crisis, globalization, and technological factors that drive environmental degradation are all tethered at the root to preliminary concepts relating to human behaviours, beliefs, values, and expectations. This essay maintains that the diagnoses should begin at the level of culture since it is at that level that ecological problems begin to germinate. Through a discussion that draws on Federico Campagna's Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, this essay performs a thematic reading of Art & Lies. Using Campagna's elucidation of the metaphysical assumptions that inform environmentally destructive practices, it argues that Art & Lies draws attention to these assumptions and identifies in them an obstacle to raising ecological awareness. Additionally, by employing an approach that draws on ecocritical scholarship, this essay discusses how formal and linguistic experimentation in Art & Lies inscribes ecological viewpoints and attempts the mission of redress that could benefit a more ecologically attuned future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook is about the cyber and story-making experience of Ali/Alix, the main character and the narrator of many interwoven narratives who experiments with time and retells well-known historical literary texts in the novel. Toward the end of the novel, while he knots himself into time, Ali calls to mind St. Augustine and thinks that St. Augustine might be right when he said "the universe was not created in time but with time." St. Augustine, one of the most important Fathers of Christianity whose writings had a great impact on shaping the Western prejudices about sex and the body, is also important for his ideas of time. In spite of the short reference to St. Augustine in The PowerBook, Ali/Alix's story-telling experience can be read not only as a deconstruction and encarnalization of St Augustine's metaphysical philosophy, but also as reconstructing his personal life and philosophy in the queer spatio-temporal cyber world of the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Frankenstein's existential dilemmas of humanity and science have led the novel to be upheld as a premonition of the dangers of overreaching technological advancements, a theme that seems more relevant than ever in the current age. Out of the "creative progeny" of Mary Shelley's work, Ahmed Saadawi and Jeanette Winterson's invocations of Frankenstein stand out as they reimagine the text through distinctive political turning points, questioning how horrors of the past can be reworked to fit new terrors. Their respective works, Frankenstein in Baghdad and Frankissstein, contemplate the future of the human body as altered by technology whether incited by warfare or by the introduction of artificial intelligence. Although different in terms of geographical setting and genre, both texts are connected in their reinvestigation of Frankenstein's core concerns of otherness as related to gender and race, responsibility, as well as the future of humanity and literature. Within their works, the relationships of creator and creation, as well as the individual and society, transcend the supernatural elements, revealing a core anxiety about the future of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Jeanette Winterson's Gut Symmetries 'collapsed' on her three times during the writing process and she had to throw away substantial drafts. In a Paris Review interview (1997) she states: 'You really have to have faith the – and it is a question of faith – and you do have to believe, because there is no other way ... There is nothing to say that because you have covered pages in the past that you will cover them in the future. Or that they will be any good. There are no guarantees.' This can be confronting enough for established writers; how do you teach this to early writers? How do issues of process and liminality sit within the context of tertiary subject learning outcomes? Creative writing pedagogues are subject to the restraints of providing a coherent class structure and this can make it difficult to move writers towards the discomfort of liminality – and yet there are strategies teachers can use to engage students with complications of process. This essay will examine writer interviews and accounts of process before outlining strategies I've used within the creative writing classroom to help students track their own processes as they face into writing and revision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on The PowerBook and The Stone Gods, this article explores the ways in which Jeanette Winterson articulates the interconnections between consciousness and memory, delineates their role in identity formation and reveals how posthuman subjects' practices of embodiment work to undermine both heteronormative and anthropocentric worldviews. The technologically inscribed bodies of the characters portrayed in these two novels, together with Winterson's rhizomatic conceptualization of space and her vertical figuration of time, allow for the time-travelling endeavours of e-storyteller Ali/x and of Robo-sapiens-cum-Robo-head Spike. Such fictional entities prompt investigations into the essence of social-material encounters, of subject-object interdependence, of matter-energy vitality, of interaction and intra-action, of reflexive thought and of self-configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeanette Winterson's latest novel Frankissstein (2019) re-animates Shelley's Gothic classic and brings it into a contemporary world of smart-tech and artificial intelligence. The novel mainly focuses on humankind's engagement with hybridity and the troubling ramifications of technological advancements. Beginning with Shelley composing Frankenstein, the novel leaps into the present day to tell the story of Ry Shelley, a trans-gender doctor self-described as "hybrid", meeting Victor Stein, a celebrated professor working on "accelerated evolution" through "self-designing" life. The novel becomes a fragmented meditation on the responsibilities of creation, the possibilities of artificial intelligence and the implications of both transsexuality and transhumanism. The reanimation in the book is supported by historical figures such as Shelley, Byron, Ada Lovelace and Turing. The events and ideas of the past seem very much alive and lending life to the work of present and future. The first part of this paper will concentrate on the postmodernist narrative techniques of the author accompanied with philosophical questions such as "What is reality? What is time? What are the responsibilities of creation? Where are the boundaries between story and real life, between consciousness and an idea? The second part of the paper will deal with the warnings of the postmodernist novel about the inevitable human future and non-biological life forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Jeannette Winterson’s novels can always be studied from a postmodern perspective. Postmodernism, though a loosely-defined term, makes reference to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic condition which does not have a direct predominant hierarchy, and epitomizes extreme entanglement, discrepancy, uncertainty, diversity, and heterogeneity. In this sense, The Passion (1987) is written to deconstruct the various domineering cultural, social and moral conventions or constructed realities and norms of Western civilisation. Techniques of postmodernism – temporal and spatial distortions, gender roles, parody, pastiche, historiographic metafiction, irony – are often used by postmodernist writers in their works. This article aims to pinpoint that Winterson is resisting dominant ideologies and discourses in The Passion, and trying to reconstruct a free and alternative discourse in the same society through postmodernist techniques in the narrative of the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Trans is "hot right now" (Winterson 1226). But who gets to write about trans issues? Winterson's and Fu's books follow in the upsurge of trans visibility in the mainstream media referred to as the "transgender tipping point" and marked by Laverne Cox's appearance on the cover of Time Magazine and prominent trans celebrity interviews on the Piers Morgan and Katie Couric shows in 2014. However, visibility can also be a "trap", as Gossett et al. have argued, in that they "accommodat[e] trans bodies, histories, and culture only insofar as they can be forced to hew to hegemonic modalities" (xxiii). Mia Fischer explains that "the popular assumption that the increased visibility of trans individuals in public discourse automatically translates into improvement in transgender people's daily lives" needs to be challenged (5). In addition to the disparity between visibility and real-life problems, the question of how trans people are represented is also problematic. As Brynn Tannehill put it, "when nearly every media portrayal of a transgender [person] is as someone who is incapable, sad, and/or pathetic, it makes it that much harder for us to be taken seriously and dig ourselves out of the hole we're in". I take Kim Fu and Jeanette Winterson as two recent examples of cisgender writers taking up trans characters, representing them in outdated and offensive ways, and basing their research about transness on sources - traditional trans memoirs, medical facts, and mainstream media - that replicate patterns which trans authors have identified as harmful. Following Jacob Hale's "Suggested Rules for Non-Transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism, or Trans," I propose five new rules cis fiction writers should adhere to when writing trans characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wittgenstein suggested that considering the context in which a word or sentence is used may help show the limitations of some ways of setting up a philosophical problem. In this article, I explore the role this suggestion may have in moral (philosophical) reflection, through a consideration of a literary example taken from Jeanette Winterson's novel, Written on the Body (2001). Using the example to elucidate ways of speaking in love that seem to embody an important truth and ways of acting and thinking that appear to be a denial of that truth, I discuss and attempt to show how different ways of attending to context may reveal the moral dimensions of this language use. I also consider one point at which attention to context seems to come to a halt and when acknowledging what is ethically significant seems to demand something different from us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though intertextual allusions can be very legible and empirically verifiable, they more often elicit elusive flickers of recognition that we struggle to find a use for when interpreting texts. This paper explores the doubt inherent in textual interplay: considering intertextuality as a form of haunting, it focuses on fleeting references that make readers see the ghosts of characters and words past hovering between the lines. It does so by analysing Winterson's Gut Symmetries (1997), a novel fascinated with the spectral quality of the universe described by contemporary physics, and the resonance between the paradoxes of quantum reality and the whimsical logic of Carroll's wonderlands. Winterson's treatment of the Carrollian intertext signals a paradigmatic change in our attempts at making sense. In their visual liminality and stubborn reluctance to signify, intertextual creatures remind us that meaning is not within the sign, but emerges in the provisional, possibly infelicitous interaction between linguistic entities. This emphasis on the pragmatics of verbal and visual encounter between texts and readers calls for another theory of interpretation: one which considers the fragility of recognition, not as an obstacle to 'proper' practices of reading, but as the very condition through which meaning can emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though Jeanette Winterson has insisted on the idea that in her writing she is not particularly interested in folk tales or fairy tales, many of her narratives are influenced by and intertwined with elements from fairy tales. It is true that Winterson does not generally rewrite fairy tales, but their presence is pervasive in many of her novels. In the case of The Passion (1987), the novel includes an Emperor, a Queen of Spades and a princess 'whose tears turned to jewels as she walked', as well as goblins, elves, and fairies. Besides, an important part of the story takes place in Venice, a city which is a maze in itself with all the mythical connotations that this has, and there are characters who accomplish extraordinary feats like walking on water or seeing things happening at a huge distance. In this paper, though, the main focus will be on the technique of storytelling in Winterson's The Passion. Storytelling is an inherent part of fairy tales, which belong to an oral tradition and are created to be told rather than read. Throughout The Passion, characters are always telling stories to one another and, as readers, we are continuously reminded that we are 'listening' to stories. Therefore, the paper will explore the similarities that might exist between telling a fairy tale and a novel such as this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeanette Winterson’s 2007 novel The Stone Gods is an admonitory tale about human environmental irresponsibility: in a highly gendered narrative the novelist demonstrates how the patriarchal domination inherent in human civilization leads to the destruction of the planet. Drawing upon the theoretical framework provided by posthumanist studies, especially the feminist perspective of Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti, the article interprets Winterson’s novel as a critique of the masculinist domination of human culture. It shows The Stone Gods as one of Haraway’s “feminist cyborg stories”, demonstrating that a female robot might prove to be a model for new human subjectivity which could lead our civilization away from the path towards self-destruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Jeanette Winterson's works display an electrifying combination of features, some characteristic to modernist poetics, others representative for postmodernist poetics, this paper aims to assess the oppositional critical claims that tend to assign Winterson's novels to the postmodernist trend and, respectively, to the modernist tradition, by taking into account both the author's work (fictional, as well as non-fictional) and her own self-proclaimed affiliation to modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler asked, "[i]s the breakdown of gender binaries... so monstrous, so frightening, that it must be held to be definitionally impossible and heuristically precluded from any effort to think gender?" (Butler, 1990: viii) As a starting point this question is used to look at the way that gender is understood and unsettled in contemporary British fiction, specifically in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve (1977) and Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body (1994). In this respect, Carter's The Passion of New Eve demonstrates how the subjects are already transgendered and continuously reshaping the material world through the reconceptualization of the transgendered subjects. On the other hand, Winterson's Written on the Body urges the reader to consider how possible to discuss sex and sexuality of the narrator when his/her gender is never exposed and how the reader constitutes an identity for the narrator and an entrance into the text in the absence of sex. Then, this study will show that how gender ambiguity created by the presence of a gender-undeclared, nameless narrator of Written on the Body, together with the trans narrator of The Passion of New Eve, enable the reader to interrogate gender dynamics and to reconsider the categories of sex and sexuality with alteration in mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fairy tales have had a significant effect on societies' cultural and literary existence in terms of shaping, reflecting and handing down their traditional values and norms. So it is not a coincidence that since the beginning of the 20th century, the themes, motifs and contents of fairy tales have been incorporated into many post-modern texts in different ways. Thus, while fairy tales have started to establish reciprocal relations with the texts of the post-modern era, the notion of 'intertextuality' has also gained importance in connection with postmodernism, as well. The aim of this paper is to explore the intertextual encounters in the second chapter of Jeanette Winterson's post-modern novel, Sexing the Cherry, and the fairy tale 12 Dancing Princesses, compiled by Grimm Brothers in 1812 in the light of Riffaterre's (1978) intertextuality theory. To that end, an intertextual reading has been carried out between the fairy tale and the novel; and the fairy tale character archetypes extracted from the original fairy tale are contrasted with the ones in Winterson's postmodern novel by focusing on how these characters are recreated in the novel through intertextual relations by adopting Riffaterre's (1978) intertextuality theory. At the end of the study, the intertextual analysis has shown that intertextual relations are established through both "Ordinary Intertextuality" and "Obligatory Intertextuality" and that fairy tale character archetypes are subverted and reconstructed around "a nucleus idea" which refers to Riffaterre's "hypogram". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011) is the autobiography of the writer whose life is marked by traumas connected with her abandonment at birth, her subsequent adoption, and a further rejection by her adoptive family when they discover that she is having a lesbian relationship. In the memoir, the paper will argue that the author tackles the hermeneutics of self-representation. She wishes to make sense of the personal past and to trace its trajectory as a means to discover the origin of the self and re-write it along different existential and psychological lines. During her memory journey back into her past, Winterson relentlessly returns, and revisits, the traumatic events of her early life, still stored in her buried memories, allowing them to surface to her conscious mind. She gradually deconstructs her old self through a slow and painful interpretive process that, in the end, leads to psychic healing and artistic creation. Winterson's autobiography will be read in the light of memory and trauma studies; psychoanalysis, as well as Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an essay of the books "Written on the Body," "Gut Symmetries" and "The PowerBook" by Jeanette Winterson. She focuses on the idea of art being an energetic space. Particularly, queer space is discussed, the idea of creating livable lives for oneself, and same sex desires are looked at. It also mentions the importance of virtuality in order to explore these ideas. "The Nick of Time," by Elizabeth Grosz is mentioned.