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This is a full-length study of Jeanette Winterson's work as a whole, containing in-depth analyses of her eight novels and cross-references to her minor fictional and non-fictional works. It establishes the formal, thematic and ideological characteristics of the novels, and situates the writer within the general panorama of contemporary British fiction. Earlier critics usually approached Winterson exclusively either as a key lesbian novelist, or as a heavily experimental and ‘arty’ writer, whose works are unnecessarily difficult and meaningless. By contrast, this book provides a comprehensive, ‘vertical’ analysis of the novels. It combines the study of formal issues – such as narrative structure, point of view, perspective and the handling of narrative and story time – with the thematic analysis of character types, recurrent topoi, intertextual and generic allusions, etc., focused from various analytical perspectives: narratology, lesbian and feminist theory (especially Cixous and Kristeva), Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypal criticism, Tarot, Hermetic and Kabalistic symbolism, myth criticism, Newtonian and Post-Newtonian Physics, etc. Novels that read superficially, or appear simple and realistic, are revealed as complex linguistic artifacts with a convoluted structure and clogged with intertextual echoes of earlier writers and works. The conclusions show the inseparability of form and meaning (for example, the fact that all the novels have a spiralling structure reflects the depiction of self as fluid and of the world as a multiverse) and place Winterson within the trend of postmodernist British writers with a visionary outlook on art, such as Maureen Duffy, Marina Warner or Peter Ackroyd.
Refiguring childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial power, which is a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Assembled at the intersection of thought and practice, biosocial power attempts to bring envisioned futures into the present, taking hold of life in the form of childhood, thereby bridging being and becoming while also shaping the power relations that encapsulate the social and cultural world(s) of adults and children. Taking up a critical perspective which is attentive to the contingency of childhoods – the ways in which particular childhoods are constituted and configured – the method used in the book is a transversal genealogy that moves between past and present while also crossing a series of discourses and practices framed by children’s rights (the right to play), citizenship, health, disadvantage and entrepreneurship education. The overarching analysis converges on contemporary neoliberal enterprise culture, which is approached as a conjuncture that helps to explain, and also to trouble, the growing emphasis on the agency and rights of children. It is against the backdrop of this problematic that the book makes its case for refiguring childhood. Focusing on the how, where and when of biosocial power, Refiguring childhood will appeal to researchers and students interested in examining the relationship between power and childhood through the lens of social and political theory, sociology, cultural studies, history and geography.
for next to no difference between story time and discourse time, since the enactment of any moment takes about as long as the ‘original’ moment, narratives leave out material, condense the content, pass over some elements, and, of particular importance, at times relate the same moment more than once. This tendency of narrative texts – to present the same hour or day as it happens for different fi gures – struck many authors of early modern narratives as particularly strange, made evident by the fact that often when such a moment occurs there is an autoreflexive
, 2015 ) includes several useful pieces on the film, including Margaret Toth’s ‘ Memento’s postmodern noir fantasy: Place, domesticity and gender identity’ and Fran Pheasant-Kelly’s ‘Representing trauma: Grief, amnesia and traumatic memory in Nolan’s New Millennial Films’; Todd McGowan’s psychoanalytic reading of Memento in his book The fictional Christopher Nolan ( 2013 ); Tony Jackson’s ‘“Graphism” and story-time in Memento ’ discusses technologies of writing and the ways in which they relate to identity, with key passages focusing on the tattoos
the only legitimate way of dealing with the German nation. The publicist Thorsten Mense explained to us: In any case, I do not use the ‘we’ in relation to Germany, nevertheless I am part of this German society and, as part of this German society, I think it is incredibly important to point out the continuity, to point out the story time and again, the context that people do not want to see, and above all, to reveal the involvement of most of the German families in the Holocaust repeatedly, and poke the wound. 39 In Gera (Thuringia), we met the members of a
from it, a faraway body speaking a mysterious language, possessing uncertain coastlines, associated with mind-altering powers, hermetic secrets, and the occupation of secluded spaces. Story-time A standard history of chess – useful despite its selective inclusions and omissions – goes something like the following. Although clouded in mystery, the game is thought to have arisen in the ‘East’ and settled in the ‘West’. D. Li’s Genealogy of Chess (1998) alleges Chinese origins for the game, although India, Persia, and China all evidently played some part.7 As Harry
discourse), story time (the time the narrative events take 176 Participatory reading in late-medieval England place within the synthetic space of the narrative), and system time. Koskimaa notes that multiple levels of temporality can be engaged simultaneously, for system time operates in the same moments as story time and discourse time; this convergence of temporalities ‘merge together in a novel way’ in digital media.12 Such merging of temporalities suggests a particularly interesting development, for it indicates that distinct modes of temporalities may, in
following pertain to story-time, i.e. time as it is constructed, presented, and conceived of in the individual legends: ‘to þe fyfte our of þe day’ (II, 55); ‘in þe mornynge’ (VII, 821); ‘at þe sexte oure’ (XVIII, 209); ‘one þe twenty day’ (XVIII, 218); ‘quhene þe day be-guth to daw’ (XVIII, 879); ‘wyntyre & somir’ (XXII, 3); ‘syne thre hundyr ȝere’ (XXIII, 387); ‘þe space of three ȝeris & mare’ (XXXV, 160). Mediated through the narrator’s words, this representation of temporality is symptomatic of the perception of time being essentially a process of narrativisation, as
the twentieth-century Spain as being stuck in the ‘middle-ages’ and Amenábar seems to extend that metaphor into 1944, which is significantly the same year as the story-time of El laberinto del fauno . The isolation of Grace’s household is dramatised by the fact that they live in a sort of ‘limbo’; the Isle of Jersey, separated by water from both England and France, and arguably, as is Don Jaime
expect to be able to distil this from how the dialogue was recorded and publicly communicated. I noted in chapter 4 that the Report on the Public Consultation was published in two formats: one for adults and another for children (NCO 2000c, 2000d). The launch of the NCS replicated this innovation by appointing a children’s writer to produce a special children’s version of the policy document.13 It was an Inter-Departmental Group that agreed this approach, and on the basis of this decision the dialogical approach to policy was transformed into story-time. In