Rethinking Elfriede Jelinek's language of violence.

• Main Author: Nur Farihin Mohammad Khairunan.
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/52217
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In “Rethinking the Seventies: Women Writers and Violence”, feminist critic Elaine Showalter reflects back on a decade of women’s fiction and observes that women writers are engaging in a new mode of writing by “insisting on their access to a complete … language of the body” (Rethinking The Seventies 157), which allows them to be more honest in writing the “full range of female experience” (157). This concept of inscribing the body into writing is a fundamental component of écriture feminine, a theoretical construct for women’s writing that was developed by Hélène Cixous and other prominent French feminists of the 1970s. In her influential feminist manifesto “The Laugh of The Medusa”, Cixous encourages women to “write” (Cixous 245), in order to be liberated from an oppressive system that has long been centered on male dominance. More importantly, woman must write her “self” (245). By drawing on her body, she will have access to a site of knowledge and inspiration that is out of reach to men, which will allow her to write in a language that functions outside masculine thinking. She will then be able to represent herself in a system that is not dominated by the patriarchal writing practices and the symbolic structures of language constructed by men. Cixous is hopeful that with this new mode of writing, woman will be able to reclaim her voice and her body, which she has been “driven […] violently” (245) from.