ABSTRACT
I argue that literary texts after 1980 use the fluid relationship between matter and
discourse within the literary object itself in order to present alternate versions of the
subjectivity and interiority. Examining works by Morrison, Gibson, Acker, Kane, and
Jackson, I demonstrate the ways in which these texts revise and reinterpret the dualist
division of mind and body by offering bodily metaphors for their character’s interior
emotional lives. Taking a cue from recent new materialist scholarship, I argue that these
metaphorizations of the body blur the boundaries between the corporeal and the abstract,
not simply by granting the body representational agency, but also by proposing that the
interiors of subjects, or even metaphors themselves, have unexpected materiality.
I emphasize the political implications of the kinds of bodies employed in these
metaphors and the representational labor they take on, setting this against the background
of the body politics of late twentieth century feminism. I read my primary texts alongside
the work of Kristeva, Cixous, Irigary, and others, in order to chart the parallel projects of
literature and poststructuralist theory in articulating the relationship between the female
body and masculine economies of representation. Starting with the 1980s, when the
second wave feminist movement suffered conservative backlash, and continuing through
the development of the third wave, I examine literary theorizations of feminist concerns
during a period of transition in the feminist movement itself.
My first chapter looks at the use of the pregnant body in descriptions of character
self-address in Beloved, arguing that Morrison’s deployment of this metaphor challenges
damaging descriptions of black maternal corporeality. I supplement my analysis of the
novel with Kristeva’s writings on maternity, as well as a contextualizing analysis of the
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rhetorical similarities between descriptions of the black body as an “empty vessel” for
white investment in the time of slavery and figurations of that same body in the Reagan
era. My second chapter, on the presentation of the copied body in Neuromancer (and
revisions of that presentation in Empire of the Senseless), continues chapter one’s
analysis of figurations of the “empty” female body, this time using a set of texts that test
the boundaries of this metaphor through storyworlds in which the body can be more
literally duplicated, remotely inhabited, and hollowed out. I explore the relationship
between these two texts alongside Cixous’s writings on the position of the feminine in
men’s self-representation, as well as contemporaneous activism against real world
gendered violence.
My third chapter moves into the 1990s, where I read the bodies of couples—
bodies which are mutilated and modified throughout Kane’s play, Cleansed—against
third wave critiques of romantic love, as well as Irigaray’s writings on distance and
intimacy. I argue that Grace’s physical transformation into the body of her lover is not an
attempt to merge two separate humans into one, but an argument for the internal
heterogeneity of individual subjects. This blurring of the relationship between interior
subjectivity and the external operation of the body, increasingly present in the first three
chapters, reaches its fullest expression in my fourth and final chapter. I examine The
Melancholy of Anatomy, in which body materials like blood and fat are dislodged from
their anatomical homes, sometimes even being made into new, non-human subjects. I
argue that this revises treatments of the body, and matter itself, as relentlessly linked with
death and vulnerability, placing them rather as sources of life and animation, both in the
extra-textual world and within the surprisingly material world of the text itself.
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PUBLIC ABSTRACT
I argue that literary texts after 1980 use the fluid relationship between the physical
world and the world of writing in order to present alternate versions of the body’s
relationship to the mind. Examining works by Toni Morrison, William Gibson, Kathy
Acker, Sarah Kane, and Shelley Jackson, I demonstrate the ways in which these texts
reinterpret the relationship between mind and body by offering bodily metaphors for their
character’s interior emotional lives; they compare this inner life to a pregnant mother, a
sexual couple, and more. I emphasize the political implications of the kinds of bodies
employed in these metaphors, setting this against the background of late twentieth
century feminism. I read my primary texts alongside the work of Julia Kristeva, Hélène
Cixous, Luce Irigary, and others, in order to chart the parallel projects of literature and
theory in articulating the relationship between the body—especially, the female body—
and our understandings of subjectivity and representation. Starting with the 1980s, when
the second wave feminist movement suffered conservative backlash, and continuing
through the development of the third wave, I examine literary theorizations of feminist
concerns during a period of transition in the feminist movement itself.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures ................................................................................................................... vii
Introduction..........................................................................................................................1
Chapter One: “This is your ma’am”: Black maternal bodies, textual investments, and
revising interiors in Morrison’s Beloved............................................................................18
Chapter Two: “Spit At All Mirrors Which Control”: Copied Bodies, Copied Text,
and the Character of Rape in Neuromancer and Empire of the Senseless .........................51
Chapter Three: “Safe on the other side and here”: Couplehood, Containers, and the
Language of the Subject in Cleansed.................................................................................94
Chapter Four: “I found myself inside him”: Gross Narrative and Routes to the
Human in Melancholy of Anatomy ..................................................................................127
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................155
Works Cited .....................................................................................................................159
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine advertisement .......................................................52
Figure 2 Coppertone advertisement...........................................................................52
Figure 3 Kruger, Girl Don’t Die For Love................................................................95
Figure 4 Spielberg, A.I. Artificial Intelligence.........................................................129
Figure 5 Drew, “The Falling Man” .........................................................................129

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