| dc.description.abstract | Jeanette Winterson’s infamous use of intertextuality and self-quotation, often dismissed
as arrogance, compels her readers to locate her works within an interconnected cycle. This thesis
argues that Winterson’s reference and repetition are evidence of a poststructuralist project: she
reconceives the unities of autobiography, history, and identity as networks of relations.
Foucauldian archaeology, the study of discourse as a system of references rather than a thematic
unity, provides an appropriate toolkit in studying Winterson’s discursive method. Her memoir
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? returns to many of the same events of her semi-autobiographical
novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, suggesting that any attempt at writing
the authoritative version of one’s life story is always partial or fractured. Much the same, the
fantastic elements and self-deprecating narrators within her historical novels The Passion and
Sexing the Cherry imply authoritative or historical facts are as fictions, open to the surreal or
contradictory and accessed through the personal. Last, in Written on the Body, Winterson
encourages her reader to interpret the narrator’s gender from textual clues, just as the reader of
Weight confronts biographical parallels between author and character; in both cases, identity is a
narrative, open to play and revision. | en_US |
