The Monstrous Cosmos of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein

In her 2019 novel Frankissstein: A Love Story, Jeanette Winterson weaves an intricate transtemporal and trans-spatial multiplicity, the coding of which is governed by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Through the double first-person narrative of Mary Shelley and her 21st-century reincarnation, Ry Shelley, Winterson approaches the literary phenomenon of Frankenstein in its entirety, seamlessly traversing and fusing the levels of the novel’s production, thematic and formal structuring, and reception. This paper argues that by employing the patchwork nature of Shelley’s monster as the principal metaphor for the creation of her own textual hybrid, Winterson upgrades the essentially Cartesian device of metafictional referencing into a bona fide world-building device that functions according to the governing principles of the post-Cartesian, i.e., postmodern, ontological order.

Literary dynamics in The.PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Interaction between text and reader is a prominent concern in stylistics. This paper focusses on interactions among stylistic processes and subconscious microcognitive processes that generate changes to narrative and interpretation during reading. Drawing on process philosophy and recent neuroscientific research, I articulate this dynamism through analysis of a brief narrative moment from each of The.PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. I argue that high densities of stylistic and microcognitive perturbations lead to frequent narrative and interpretive changes in the two moments. The analyses reinforce portrayals of reading as intensely complex, dynamic and changeable. Complexity, dynamism and mutability also characterise the stylistic changes in the two narrative moments. This paper advocates greater attention to the role of volatile stylistic and cognitive microdynamics in shaping the reading of prose fiction.

The Contemporary Art of the Nature Morte in the Age of Artificial Life Forms: The Metafictional Illusion of Life in Installation Art and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein

Observing the artistic response to the illusional nature of artificial life forms in the field of installation art, contemporary writers often allude to conceptual artworks through ekphrastic means to “grasp the texture of the contemporary real” (Virilio 4) in a technologically “transformative moment” (Boxall 4). A “reality hunger” for the contemporary brings together a “burgeoning group of interrelated […] artists in a multitude of forms of media” (Shields 3) to experiment new forms across disciplines through ekphrasis, which “strikes to explode” the “stuffed package” of a culture “containable with its shaped word” (Krieger 233). In her essay “Art Objects” (1995), Jeanette Winterson shows her interest in contemporary conceptual art as she writes that “the true artist is interested in the art object as an art process” and establishing a connection to the future instead of being interested in the final product (12). Her definition of art coincides with that of conceptual art as it seeks to analyse “the ideas underlying the creation and reception of art” (Shanken 433), and thus takes on the framework of the meta-critical process from conceptual art with “the use of scientific concepts and technological media both to question their prescribed applications and to create new aesthetic models” (Shanken 434). Deriving from the artistic landscape of conceptual installation art and its interactions with science, Winterson borrows the subject of the nature morte and the metafictional framework to address the clashes between artificial life forms and the human civilisation by alluding to artworks such as those of Damien Hirst in her novel Frankissstein (2019) when writing about cryonic bodies: “It’s a little like an art installation in here isn’t it? Have you seen Damien Hirst’s pickled shark in a tank?” (106). Based on the interdisciplinary interrelations between installation art and contemporary literature, this paper will read the dialogue between Winterson’s ekphrastic subject of the nature morte in Frankissstein and contemporary installation art, including works of Hirst, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Guillaume Paris, as a response to the rise of artificial life forms with respect to their metafictional and illusional nature as AI will become “fully self-designing” (Winterson 73).

Magic Realism and Experimental Fiction

In 1934, Argentinian editor and writer Victoria Ocampo commissioned Jorge Luis Borges the translations of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Orlando, to be published in 1935 and 1937, respectively, under the auspices of the intellectual circle ‘Sur’ (‘South’). These translations would inspire generations of writers, appealed by Woolf’s subversive strategies to trespass physical and psychological boundaries, and by her innovative conception of time, history, and gender, which anticipated what came to be later known as ‘magic realism’. This essay explores the ways in which Woolf’s influence affects the construction of alternative ontological realms that both coexist with and transcend identifiable historical sites in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Michèle Roberts, and Jeanette Winterson. The chapter further examines the different strategies these writers use to unsettle received assumptions pertaining to history and to propose alternative rewritings of it in Woolf’s wake.

Queer Theory

Many of Virginia Woolf’s books from the 1920’s and early 1930’s feature characters with queer longings. The mock biography Orlando (1928) was written for Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s lover, and exemplifies her work’s queerness. Beginning male but waking up one morning female, Orlando shakes up fixed ontologies of gender identity and sexual orientation, anticipating Sara Ahmed’s analysis of queer spatiality and Elizabeth Freeman’s examination of queer temporality. Orlando’s concerns are reinflected in the work of contemporary English novelist Jeanette Winterson and invite transnational comparisons to twentieth-century Islamic writing, such as the works of Indian writer Iqbalunnisa Hussain, Egyptian novelist Nawal El Saadawi, and Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun. Crossing borders of gender, nation, and time, Orlando and other of Woolf’s writings ask readers to engage the divergences and continuities between what we now call feminist, lesbian, queer, and transgender theories.

Technological Practices of Embodiment Reflected in Jeanette Winterson’s Fictional Framing of Posthuman Subjects

Focusing on The PowerBook and The Stone Gods, this article explores the ways in which Jeanette Winterson articulates the interconnections between consciousness and memory, delineates their role in identity formation and reveals how posthuman subjects’ practices of embodiment work to undermine both heteronormative and anthropocentric worldviews. The technologically inscribed bodies of the characters portrayed in these two novels, together with Winterson’s rhizomatic conceptualization of space and her vertical figuration of time, allow for the time-travelling endeavours of e-storyteller Ali/x and of Robo-sapiens-cum-Robo-head Spike. Such fictional entities prompt investigations into the essence of social-material encounters, of subject-object interdependence, of matter-energy vitality, of interaction and intra-action, of reflexive thought and of self-configuration.

seda fina del viure

En aquest article es planteja la necessitat i vigència de les retraduccions, tant en català com en altres llengües, i se n’analitzen alguns casos. Concretament, es parla de la retraducció al català de Mrs Dalloway a la primeria del segle XXI els canvis propiciats per les convencions literàries de cada època respecte a la traducció dels anys trenta del segle XX. També s’exposa la retraducció feta per la mateixa persona d’un llibre de Jeanette Winterson trenta anys després.

seda fina del viure

En aquest article es planteja la necessitat i vigència de les retraduccions, tant en català com en altres llengües, i se n’analitzen alguns casos. Concretament, es parla de la retraducció al català de Mrs Dalloway a la primeria del segle XXI els canvis propiciats per les convencions literàries de cada època respecte a la traducció dels anys trenta del segle XX. També s’exposa la retraducció feta per la mateixa persona d’un llibre de Jeanette Winterson trenta anys després.

INTERTEXUAL CONNECTIONS OF JEANETTE WINTERSON’S “FRANKISSSTEIN” AND MARY SHELLEY’S “FRANKENSTEIN: OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS”

Постмодернистский роман Дж. Уинтерсон “Frankissstein” балансирует между жанрами, являя собой причудливый сплав научной фантастики, сатирического памфлета, готического, любовного романа; психологического романа о трудностях взросления. В диалоге с претекстом, романом «Франкенштейн, или Современный Прометей» (1818) авторства Мэри Шелли, современная писательница размышляет о возможности и оправданности человеческого вмешательства в природу, в том числе половую, уже на новом витке развития цивилизации, в разгар очередной научно-технической революции. Действие романа “Frankissstein” разворачивается в двух временных и пространственных плоскостях, связанных системой героев-двойников. Первая отсылает к истории создания романа «Франкенштейн, или Современный Прометей» и биографии его автора Мэри Шелли. Второй пласт повествования рассказывает о мире, похожем на современный, где доктор Виктор Штейн задействован в долгосрочном научном проекте, связанном с сохранением в замороженном виде тел добровольцев, с целью их дальнейшего воскрешения силами науки, а также делает опыты по восстановлению, в автономии от тела, интеллекта умерших. Феминистская проблематика представлена в романе в оригинальном ключе. Протест против гендерной стереотипизации в романе соседствует с раздумьями о гендерной и сексуальной идентичности и сопряженной с ними дискриминации. The postmodernist novel “Frankissstein” by Jeanette Winterson balances between genres, presenting a fusion of science fiction, satirical pamphlet, gothic, romance novel; psychological novel about growing up, coupled with trauma. In a dialogue with the pretext, “Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus” (1818) by Mary Shelley, Winterson reflects on the possibility and justification of human intervention in nature, including sexual, already at a new stage of development of civilization, in the midst of another scientific and technological revolution. The novel “Frankissstein” takes place in two temporal and spatial planes, connected by a system of double heroes. The first refers to the history of the creation of the novel “Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus” and the biography of its author Mary Shelley. The second layer of the narrative tells about a world similar to the modern, where Dr. Victor Stein is involved in long-term research project related to preserving frozen bodies of volunteers, with a view to their future resurrection of the forces of science and doing experiments on the restoration of the autonomy of the body, the intellect of the dead. Feminist issues are presented in the novel in an original way. The protest against gender stereotyping in the novel is juxtaposed with reflections on gender and sexual identity and the discrimination associated with them.

Cuerpos monstruosos, biotecnología e identidad de género en Frankissstein (2019), de Jeanette Winterson

En el presente artículo nos proponemos analizar las representaciones del cuerpo fragmentado e intervenido por la técnica y reflexionar acerca de los debates sobre las identidades de género que se observan en Frankissstein (2019), última novela publicada por la autora británica Jeanette Winterson (Manchester, 1959). Esta obra se inscribe en el género de la ciencia ficción y, al mismo tiempo, recupera y reescribe, como es evidente desde el juego de palabras del título, un texto canónico del Romanticismo inglés, Frankenstein (1818) de Mary Shelley. Serán centrales en nuestro estudio los aportes desde los estudios queer de Judith Butler y Paul B. Preciado, así como los vínculos entre transhumanismo, género y ciencia ficción que detectan Donna Haraway y Rosi Braidotti, entre otros.