Schizo-narratives: Feminist activism through affect in contemporary women's experimental writing

Robinson, Carly Marie (2024) Schizo-narratives: Feminist activism through affect in contemporary women's experimental writing. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis investigates the affective potential of reading experimental literature as a mode of literary feminist activism. Interrogating a specific sub-set of contemporary experimental writing for its capacity to affect readers through stylistic innovation and formal experimentation, this research proposes a new definition of schizo-narratives to suggest how these texts situate the reader as active participant and co-producer of textual meaning. Examining the work of four contemporary authors; Ali Smith, Eimear McBride, Nicola Barker and Maggie Nelson, the thesis combines philosophical and literary critique with close textual analysis to advance a conception of feminist literary activism. The research is theoretical underpinned by the post-structuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and utilises their concepts of minor-literature and becoming-woman as a feminist tactic of destabilising normative paradigms of subjectivity. Chapter One contextualises the definition of schizo-narratives by unpacking the concept of minor literature and tracing a history of feminist experimental writing. Chapter Two examines the Deleuzo-Guattarian theoretical framework to explore how the key philosophical concepts of becoming-woman, rhythmanalysis and schizoanalysis together with scholarship on multimodality and cognitive poetics serve as the basis of the schizo-narrative model. Chapter Three begins the close textual analysis of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet and Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY identifying techniques that disrupt realist representations of spatio-temporality. Chapter Four investigates the use of narrative voice and multimodality as tools of disruption within Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing and Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY to explore themes of subjectivity as multiplicity and the fragmented or self. Chapter Five brings together themes of social commentary and political urgency to demonstrate how Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts work both as feminist becoming-narratives in themselves and demand a response and call to action from the reader.

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