?criture f?minine (feminine writing) proposed by Cixous (1976) conceives of human language under patriarchal discourse as distortion of women’s body individual and social identity To reclaim their image women ought to continually invent individual writings that can transgress binarism shake rationality and logics associate language with their body and libidinal desire and is characteristic of its malleable linguistic structure and semantic non-closure so as to liberate itself from phallogocentric representationalism However less research has been dedicated to ?criture f?minine’s linguistic peculiarity from a structuralist angle because of its undefinability From the stance of Spivak’s (2006) strategic essentialism this thesis combines ?criture f?minine and Genette’s (1980) mimesis based on their cohesive and corporeal metaphorical/metonymic commonness and proposes that the semantic ongoingness of ?criture f?minine parallels mimetization amidst narrative distance spectrum I adopt English cohesion theory developed by Halliday & Hasan (1976) and Martin (1992) to examine the antilogocentrism of ?criture f?minine and employ Lakoff & Johnson’s (2003) conceptual metaphor mapping theory and Peirsman & Geeraerts’ (2006) prototypical configuration of metonymy to explore ?criture f?minine’s challenge against self/other binarism and its reinterpretation of individual body Apropos of materials Study I extracts incipient texts from 10 post-1980 English covert novels which are paired with their respective summaries forming 10 mimesis-diegesis pairs Without premise on ?criture f?minine Study I contrasts within-pair cohesive and corporeal metaphorical/metonymic phenomena Study II analyzes these phenomena in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931/2010) an English novel with characteristics of ?criture f?minine to investigate if ?criture f?minine shares the linguistic features of mimetic narrations observed in Study I Result of Study I reveals that when uniting the same two semantic entities mimetic texts rely on (1) less adversative and causal conjunctions (2) more personal pronominal cataphoric reference in incipient paragraphs and (3) more syntactic construction reiteration than their diegetic counterparts In terms of cohesive metafunction mimesis expresses lower logical meaning while is ideationally more salient Concerning metaphor and metonymy more corporeal metaphors and metonymies are discovered in mimetic narratives than their diegetic counterparts In Study II cohesive performance in The Waves corresponds more to the observations of mimetic narrations in Study I Conceptual metaphor HUMAN IS NATURE and conceptual metonymy GROUP FOR INDIVIDUAL can be extrapolated Via the cohesive analysis I argue that both mimetic distance and ?criture f?minine prioritize detailed portrayal of characters and subject matters more The logical connection among characters and plots tend to be constructed in bottom-up reading model proposed by Grabe & Stoller (2002) Through the study of metaphor and metonymy I propose that both ?criture f?minine and mimetic narrations create corporeal metaphors/metonymies able to extend the entrenched cognition and to perform in literary works In The Waves the concept [INDIVIDUAL] mapped by [NATURE] and [GROUP] attenuates self/other dichotomy returns to a choraic indifferentiation of mother and fetus’ subjectivity and associates semantic concepts separated by categorization This parallels mimetic narrations where the original panorama of events is restored without narrators’ overt interpretation In this research the linguistic peculiarities between ?criture f?minine and mimetic narrations not only manifest their antilogocentric relation but exhibit an affective force that overflows phallogocentrism and enables individuals to continually write their own bodies and gender identities via other different linguistic alternatives
Antilogocentrism of ?criture F?minine and Mimetic Narration: Cohesion and Corporeal Metaphor/Metonymy
寬, 李. (Author). 2019
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis