Impersonal Narration in the Prose of Margit Kaffka, Emma Ritoók and Jolán Földes

Authors

  • Edit Zsadányi University of Groningen, Netherlands

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2011.41

Keywords:

narrative, modernism, female writers, impersonal narration

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the ways in which women writers have contributed to literary modernity, and discuss approaches and rhetoric tropes that are able to convey the peculiarities of femininity. To this purpose, I have chosen to discuss a range of gendered prose poetry methods used by women writers of the first half of the 20th century that articulate the peculiarities of women’s identities. Inspired by feminist researchers Griselda Pollock and Rita Felski, I also examine instances and possible interpretations of gendered impersonal narration, such as the rhetoric of enumeration, overlapping cultural and fictional narratives, and the projection of feminine subjectivity onto objects. I also emphasize that we must take into account not only to the voice, language and personality of a character or narrator when examining constructs of their (feminine) self-image, but also other signs emerging elsewhere in the text.

Author Biography

Edit Zsadányi, University of Groningen, Netherlands

Edit Zsadányi is currently Lecturer of Hungarian literature and culture at the Finno-Ugric Department at the University of Groningen, and she has also taught at the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She teaches BA and MA courses, and holds PhD consultations in the field of Hungarian modernist and postmodernist prose fiction, gender studies, postmodern and narrative theories. Her articles and three major publications cover a wide range of 20th century Hungarian modernist and postmodernist authors (including Dezső Kosztolányi, Zsigmond Móricz, Mihály Babits, László Krasznahorkai, Péter Esterházy, Erzsébet Galgóczy, Lajos Parti Nagy, Imre Kertész, Alaine Polcz, Ferenc Barnás, Szilárd Borbély, Agáta Gordon, Kriszta Tóth, Virág Erdős and Kriszta Bódis) as well as 20th century American authors (such as Djuna Barnes, Joyce Carol Oates, Gertrude Stein, Kathy Acker and Jhumpa Lahiri).

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Published

2011-01-01

Issue

Vol. 4 (2011)

Section

Gender Cluster - Articles

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