The" Woman" as a Frame for the Self: Femininity, Ekphrasis, and Aesthetic Selfhood in John Banville's Eclipse, Shroud, and Ancient Light - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Estudios Irlandeses Journal of Irish Studies Année : 2018

The" Woman" as a Frame for the Self: Femininity, Ekphrasis, and Aesthetic Selfhood in John Banville's Eclipse, Shroud, and Ancient Light

Résumé

Banville’s latest trilogy Eclipse, Shroud, and Ancient Light forms an interconnected web of narratives that aptly dramatizes Banville’s fictional investigation of subjectivity and otherness. The “other” in these narratives is consistently a female other on whom the narrators bestow a multitude of roles in their narcissist quests for authenticity. The “woman” is represented simultaneously as an enigma, the site of “truth”, the guarantor of the narrators’ authentic self, and the screen onto which the protagonists aim to inscribe their aesthetic signatures. This paper proposes to read these figurations in close relation with the theoretical undertone with which Banville engages throughout his philosophically imbued meta-fiction. It specifically addresses the way in which the figure of the “woman” becomes entangled with Paul de Man’s elaborations on the “ontological crisis” in Romanticism as well as Friedrich Nietzsche’s aesthetics of the “surface”. Banville’s fictional engagement with these thinkers, I claim, offers a way to read the narrators’ ethical failure with regards to the key female characters as an aesthetic critique of ideology.

Dates et versions

hal-04600053 , version 1 (04-06-2024)

Identifiants

Citer

Mehdi Ghassemi. The" Woman" as a Frame for the Self: Femininity, Ekphrasis, and Aesthetic Selfhood in John Banville's Eclipse, Shroud, and Ancient Light. Estudios Irlandeses Journal of Irish Studies, 2018, 13.2, pp.30-43. ⟨10.24162/EI2018-8602⟩. ⟨hal-04600053⟩

Collections

ETHICS
3 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Mastodon Facebook X LinkedIn More