Identity and Intertextuality in Kate Atkinson’s Emotionally Weird

Year 2018, Issue: 40, 87 - 102, 24.12.2018

Hatice Yurttaş

https://doi.org/10.21497/sefad.515044

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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