Identity and Intertextuality in Kate Atkinson’s Emotionally Weird

Abstract

Many women writers employ intertextuality to question gender identity and to produce female characters who are free of the narratives that have proven to be violent, oppressive and not viable for the contemporary female experience. In this article, I propose a reading of Kate Atkinson’s 2000 novel, Emotionally Weird in the light of Bakhtin’s argument on intertextuality in novelistic discourse to understand how the novel rewrites the gendered individual. Emotionally Weird combines the quest for a new female character and the investigation of postmodern novel’s relation to previous novelistic discourses. Kate Atkinson stages a quest of identity, crystallized in Euphemia Stuart Murray’s search for her true parentage, which merges with the quest of the paternity of the novel searched through the rewritings of literary traditions. The new woman that emerges when these quests are resolved is an illegitimate woman writer; a bastard born out of wedlock who disrupts the law of inheritance while the postmodern novel is similarly shown as an illegitimate novelistic discourse born out of its dialogism with previous novelistic discourses and other literary forms.

Keywords

• Postmodern novel,women's writing,parody,feminism,rewriting

Kate Atkinson’ın Emotionally Weird Romanında Kimlik ve Metinlerarasılık

Abstract

Birçok kadın yazar toplumsal cinsiyeti sorgulamak ve baskıcı ve artık çağdaş dünya için geçerli olmayan anlatılardan kurtulmuş kadın karakterler yaratmak için metinlerarası ilişkileri kullanır. Bu makalede Kate Atkinson’ın Emotionally Weird adlı romanı Bakhtin’in roman söyleminde metinlerarası ilişkileri kuramı çerçevesinde incelenmiştir. Emotionally Weird Euphemia Stuart Murray adlı karakterin biyolojik kökenlerini arayışı üzerinden bir kimlik sorunsalı sunar ve bu arayışı önceki edebiyat anlatılarının yeniden yazımlarıyla gerçekleştirilen postmodern romanın kökeni üzerine bir arayışla birleştirir. Bu iki sorgulama sonucunda ortaya evlilik dışı doğmuş, miras kanunlarını alt üst eden gayri meşru bir kadın yazar ortaya çıkar. Postmodern roman da önceki roman söylemleri ile ilişkiler içinde doğmuş, orijinal değil, yeniden yazımlardan oluşan benzer bir illegal söylem olarak sunulur.

Keywords

• Postmodern roman,kadın yazını,parodi,feminizm,yeniden yazım

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