Browsing by Subject "Sex role in literature"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    "So I changed tack…all an act": Subversive gender representations in Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife (1999) and Rapture (2005)
    (2015) Jaffe, Rachel; McInerney, Maud Burnett
    The poetry of Britain’s present Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has been described by her critics as admiringly accessible yet lacking in complexity. Most notably, Simon Britton and Geoffrey Hill posit that Duffy’s form is careless—that her diction is too casual, her syntax, riddled with clichés. However, where Britton and Hill take issue, other critics, such as Deryn Reese Jones, find value, praising the comprehensibility of Duffy’s common language for opening her poetry to a wide audience. In building upon the current conversation surrounding her work, this essay aims to expose how Duffy empowers the female voice through use of techniques that, ironically, stem from a tradition that historically hindered female narrative authority. This essay draws upon sources that are concerned with such poetics of the past, thereby allowing for intertextual analyses of Duffy’s The World’s Wife (1999) and Rapture (2005). Discussion of common language in the romantic lyric, the importance of performing hermeneutic readings, as well as floral imagery and the bawdy in Shakespeare’s works, all promote comparisons between Duffy’s contemporary work and that of her predecessors, contributing to the essay’s conclusion, that her clichés and easy reading are, in fact, part of a deceivingly simple, subversive strategy. Duffy’s ability to simultaneously situate herself in, and twist, the techniques of her male predecessors, promotes the agency of her female narrators, thereby demonstrating her own claim to poetic authority.
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    The Subversion of the Classic: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Re-Vision of Gender in A Wizard of Earthsea
    (2015) Martins, Opeoluwa; Stadler, Gustavus
    Le Guin captures the tropes of fantasy literature in A Wizard of Earthsea as she creates powerful individuals, usually males who dominate the narrative, but who instead become projected into a deeply flawed Ged as a means of subverting and converting the power of these types of narratives. Le Guin emphasizes Ged’s bigotry, as he perpetrates and perpetuates the gender stereotypes that he has absorbed from the ancient society of the Earthsea realm in order to create a contrast between the emotionally and magically immature Ged and the Ged who becomes a fully matured wizard not after receiving his staff or graduating from magical school but after becoming more attuned to the nuanced construction of his world and sense of self. Le Guin uses Ged’s maturation as means of rejecting fantasy cliches of negative attitudes about women and other marginalized groups, but also to emphasize the variety of ways in which masculinity can be constructed and wielded. Through her construction and deconstruction of the world of Earthsea which is exemplified by language, Le Guin does not reject fantasy nor masculinity, she instead reframes what constitutes either notion and who benefits from these attitudes.