Postmodern pathologies, living with disbelief in the fictions of Angela Carter

grantor: University of TorontoThis study of the narrative techniques employed in Angela Carter's novels, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Nights at the Circus, demonstrates that for Carter, at least, the postmodern project and the feminist one share concerns regarding the formation of subjectivities, the roles of narrative, and the possibilities for a politics of positioning in a postmodern climate of disbelief in master-narratives. The Introduction defines and examines the concepts that are central to locating my subject. A brief synopsis of postmodernism is provided, as well as a more extensive discussion of one particularly problematic master-narrative, the Oedipal paradigm. Drawing on the theories of Freud, Teresa de Lauretis, Helene Cixous, and others, I demonstrate that Oedipal textuality is complicitous with a certain sexuality, one that privileges the male as the active agent of culture and desire, and can be associated with narrative sadism. Part I shows that, in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Carter forestalls the death required by narrative. Through repetition, parody, allegory and semantic play, Carter manages to perpetuate disbelief in the Oedipal paradigm through a postmodern strategy of installing that very paradigm. Part II provides a reading of Carter's Nights at the Circus that offers alternatives to received traditions of narrative. The metaphors of the confidence trick and of comic contagion provide means of speculating on alternatives to a narrative that is intrinsically sadistic. The possibility of revisioning Oedipal textuality is further explored through the figure of Cassandra, who is inherently doubled in that she represents both the traditional silencing of Woman, because she is unheard (an Oedipal dynamic), at the same time as she prefigures the power of the seeress (a Cassandrian dynamic). The ultimate purpose of this study is to demonstrate that Carter's texts offer us strategies for living with the disbelief in metanarratives that characterizes the postmodern age. These strategies suggest possibilities, if not for derailing the Oedipal textual dynamic, then, for providing it with an altogether different mission.Ph.D