Negotiating Subjectivity and Body: Access to an E-pistolary Corporeality
Dong Xia
Publication: Volume 3 Issue 1
Abstract
Through a reading two novels based on email communication, The Metaphysical Touch (1998) by Sylvia Brownrigg and The Correspondence Artist (2011) by Barbara Browning, this paper discusses the changing culture of subjectivity and the body when writing and digital technologies converge in the literary space. This paper employs Katherine Hayles’s conceptualisation that the signification built upon presence and absence has been challenged by a cultural perception built upon information patterns and randomness to chart the luminal space arising from email writing of and between the two novels. With a deconstruction of the dominant notion of human, that privileges self-ownership, mastery, and presence, the location of the subject moves from the fixated paper to an accretive database, where the body is no longer a self-contained property, but rather becomes a co-emerging, performative body. Finally, the paper demonstrates the necessity for introducing new vocabularies such as access and database that are more flexible and less intertwined with the metaphysics of presence, and for inclusion of presence/absence dialectics into pattern/randomness interplay instead of its displacement.
Keywords: Epistolary Novel, Subjectivity, Body, Metaphysics Of Presence, Database, Pattern And Randomness
Dong Xia (d.xia@students.uu.nl) is a research master student of Comparative Literary Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University, Netherlands. She holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature from University College London. Her dissertation examines how digital technologies reconfigure ideas about subjectivity and body, and how contemporary literary writings register and negotiate such reconfigurations. Her research interests concern the relationship between contemporary literature and technologies and the modes of knowledge production informed by modern technologies.