The poetry of the fallen: tragic agency, authorship, and narratives of the human in epic+ feminist science fiction

[摘要] This BPhil thesis tells a story about stories—its central themes are origin mythsand feminist reading. The genres I explore are classic epic (I begin with my readings ofVergil’s Aeneid and Milton’s Paradise Lost) and feminist science fiction (I addressShelley’s Frankenstein, Woolf’s Orlando, Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, andRuss’s The Female Man). This paper traces the emergence of a feminist poetics in thescience fiction texts, characterized by partiality and possibility. I date its beginning toShelley’s Frankenstein and see its further articulation in works of contemporary feministscience fiction. However I will argue that we can read the great classic works, Vergil’sRoman epic and Milton’s Christian epic, with a sensitivity to partiality and possibility—and see, if in episodes and irony, this poetics in broad literary historical perspective.Taking the Aeneid in one view, we read it as a triumphant teleological narrativeof the foundations of imperial Rome culminating in Turnus’s death an act of foundingviolence. We can read Paradise Lost in the same way, a triumphant teleological narrativewith Christ as its center and redemption and damnation as the only potential outcomesoffered. This paper is an attempt to recover other possibilities and other readings fromthese classics, by focusing on the figures of Dido, Eve, and Satan. From the classics, thispaper moves into performing readings of feminist science fiction. I see Frankenstein asthe beginning of this genre, and read this novel as the beginning and source of an explicitfeminist poetics. Following my reading of Frankenstein, I move into discussing the workof contemporary feminist science fiction. Here, I analyze the poetics of a genre that isexplicitly feminist in order to understand the feminist work of constructing newnarratives and new words.

[发布机构] the University of Pittsburgh