Textual Anastomosis: About the Vanishing Body and the Resurrection of a Character. A Transversal Reading ofBlack Water(1992) andMudwoman(2012) by Joyce Carol Oates

• Authors: Andreea Pop
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In 1992, the much acclaimed prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates publishes Black Water – a very harsh and condensed literary reenactment of a gruesome event having taken place more than twenty years before and known as the “Chappaquiddick incident”. Another twenty years later, through her 2012 novel Mudwoman, the author seems to revisit the topic that had haunted her for decades. This paper aims at establishing a certain narrative pattern connecting the two novels not only thematically, but also phantasmatically: the sudden “resurrection” of Joyce Carol Oates’s character in the 2012 novel is, as we see it, far from being “incidental”. By “textual anastomosis”, we understand a subjective association of narratives in order to show how the disembodied consciousness “travels” from one character’s fictional body to another’s, triggering a whole bunch of personal memories which also resurrect in this other character’s fictional biography.

Keywords

EN

Consciousness; Death; Disembodiment; Narrative; Regression; Selfhood; Vanishing body

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human and Social Studies
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 5
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 77-92

Dates

published

2016-10-01

online

2016-10-21

Contributors

author

Andreea Pop

• Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca,

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/hssr-2016-0024