Beth Watt | Newcastle University (original) (raw)
PhD candidate at Newcastle University researching the emergence of sonic technologies throughout the twentieth-century, and their role in the dissolution of the British Empire as mediated in modernist fiction. My MA dissertation focused on the figure of the flâneuse, and her employment of the aural in the negotiations of space in the fictions of Elizabeth Bowen and Jean Rhys.
Supervisors: Professor James Procter and Dr Robbie McLaughlan
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Papers by Beth Watt
A brief examination of this essay’s three focal texts, American Psycho (1991), Money: A Suicide N... more A brief examination of this essay’s three focal texts, American Psycho (1991), Money: A Suicide Note (1984), and Lunar Park (2005), reveals a distinctive common theme: an authorial concern with marginalised male identity. The novels’ respective protagonists are men with access to significant allocations of social power, though all are preoccupied with its diminution, and throughout their narratives grapple to culturally recentre their increasingly marginalised masculine identities by exercising different modalities of male power to which they retain access – modalities which are culturally ingrained, socially institutionalised: namely sexual violence, consumerism, and patrilineal inheritance respectively. Though the endeavour of each book to explore and impose a different mode of male power upon the narrative might suggest an authorial attempt at employing the novel as a space to articulate masculine fantasy of the self, to exercise a power not afforded to men extra-diegetically, each author then works to systematically undermine and efface the fictive narrative power conferred upon his protagonist, whilst simultaneously discrediting his own extratextual power as author by destabilising notions of authorial authority. While American Psycho and Money: A Suicide Note – the subjects of chapters one and two respectively – simply resonate upon and finish stagnant within this dual male disempowerment, it is only in Lunar Park we find a simultaneous way forward for both man and author. Through a study of D.W. Winnicott’s 1958 essay ‘The Capacity to Be Alone’ – which privileges independence of self and the acceptance of mortality through dissociation with the father in the development of masculinity – this essay’s final chapter concludes that the way forward for both masculinity and authorship is a twinned path, and must constitute a simultaneous disavowal of notions of paternity, and an acknowledgment of the inevitability of death: the dual acceptance of “the end of [patriarchal] masculinity”, and the “death of the author[-father]”.
Drafts by Beth Watt
A brief examination of this essay’s three focal texts, American Psycho (1991), Money: A Suicide N... more A brief examination of this essay’s three focal texts, American Psycho (1991), Money: A Suicide Note (1984), and Lunar Park (2005), reveals a distinctive common theme: an authorial concern with marginalised male identity. The novels’ respective protagonists are men with access to significant allocations of social power, though all are preoccupied with its diminution, and throughout their narratives grapple to culturally recentre their increasingly marginalised masculine identities by exercising different modalities of male power to which they retain access – modalities which are culturally ingrained, socially institutionalised: namely sexual violence, consumerism, and patrilineal inheritance respectively. Though the endeavour of each book to explore and impose a different mode of male power upon the narrative might suggest an authorial attempt at employing the novel as a space to articulate masculine fantasy of the self, to exercise a power not afforded to men extra-diegetically, each author then works to systematically undermine and efface the fictive narrative power conferred upon his protagonist, whilst simultaneously discrediting his own extratextual power as author by destabilising notions of authorial authority. While American Psycho and Money: A Suicide Note – the subjects of chapters one and two respectively – simply resonate upon and finish stagnant within this dual male disempowerment, it is only in Lunar Park we find a simultaneous way forward for both man and author. Through a study of D.W. Winnicott’s 1958 essay ‘The Capacity to Be Alone’ – which privileges independence of self and the acceptance of mortality through dissociation with the father in the development of masculinity – this essay’s final chapter concludes that the way forward for both masculinity and authorship is a twinned path, and must constitute a simultaneous disavowal of notions of paternity, and an acknowledgment of the inevitability of death: the dual acceptance of “the end of [patriarchal] masculinity”, and the “death of the author[-father]”.