Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini

Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini
ISBN-10
135156935X
ISBN-13
9781351569354
Category
Foreign Language Study
Pages
187
Language
English
Published
2017-07-05
Publisher
Routledge
Author
Emma Bond

Description

If Madame Bovary's death in Flaubert's 1857 novel marked the definitive end of the Romantic vision of literary disease, then the advent of psychoanalysis less than half a century later heralded an entirely new set of implications for literature dealing with illness. The theorization of a potential unconscious double (capable of expressing the body, and thus also the intimate damage caused by disease) in turn suggested a capacity to subvert or destabilize the text, exposing the main thread of the narrative to be unreliable or self-conscious. Indeed, the authors examined in this study (Italo Svevo (1861-1928), Giorgio Pressburger (1937-) and Giuliana Morandini (1938-)) all make use of individual 'infected' or suppressed voices within their texts which unfold through illness to cast doubt on a more (conventionally) dominant narrative standpoint. Applying the theories of Freud and more recent writings by Julia Kristeva, Bond offers a new critical reading of the literary function of illness, a function related to the very nature of narration itself.

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