engleski

"A Bodily Rant": Kate Zambreno, Women's Writing, and the Body

In both her novels (O Fallen Angel, 2009 ; Green Girl, 2010) and essays (Heroines, 2012 ; Book of Mutter, 2017) Kate Zambreno has persistently engaged with the problem of writing from the body and of the body, especially in the context of women's writing. Her book Heroines, a blend of theory and autobiography, aims to reveal the long history of undermining women's writing and public presence, from modernist writers such as Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivienne Eliot, Sylvia Plath and Jean Rhys to contemporary women authors writing "the private in public". In Heroines and her short essay "Apoplexia, Toxic Shock, and Toilet Bowl: Some Notes on Why I Write" (2013) Zambreno is especially concerned with a specific type of personal writing that strives to give language to emotion. She describes her own writing as "a way to scream" and her blog as "a sort of toilet bowl" where she can "puke or shit words". Throughout history, literary critics have routinely dismissed this type of (women's) writing as "not writing", and Zambreno has been labeled a "menstrual blogger", presumably due to the subject matter of her texts as well as their formal aspects (fragmentary, repetitive, experimenting with automatic writing). This paper will attempt to examine the ways Zambreno constructs her "bodily rants", but also pose wider questions about the viability of a literary criticism which, by privileging the rational and rejecting the emotional and the personal, largely disregards writing by women and other marginalized groups and thus continues to support the patriarchal value system.

Kate Zambreno ; women's writing ; emotion, body

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