“The Poetics in the Works of Jeffrey Eugenides” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Jeffrey Eugeni̇des' İn Mi̇ddlesex Ve the Vi̇rgi̇n Sui̇ci̇de Adli Romanlarinda Ci̇nsi̇yet
The Journal of Academic Social Science Studies, 2018
Öz mit suicide one after another, consistently absence of identity is one of the reasons beyond their murder. This paper discusses the author's method and the similarity and differences between both of the books. It concentrates on the concept of identity in addition, the matter of gender is another concern of this article.
The Reinvention of Identity in Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex
European journal of American studies, 2011
In his second novel, Middlesex 1 , Jeffrey Eugenides is deep in the Greeks. If Melville in Moby Dick sets up an anthology of whaling, Eugenides builds his collection of Greekness. It may be because the Greeks found a mythical way out of the contradictions and the ambiguities that characterize the fragmented human being in search of unity through Hermaphroditus, the figure of an indivisible duality, quite appropriate to express the diverse reality of American unity. The Pulitzer-prized writer revisits the myth in a novel way combining it with the aporias of ethnicity. Gender trouble in Middlesex could hardly veil the immigrant and ethnic experience in America that spans three generations of a Greek family in the twentieth century. The novel is about reinventing your identity on different levels, be that Greek to American, female to male, says the author who, digging up his Greek origins, makes an original contribution to the Greek-American novel. 2 Although reviewers, unable to see the connection, found these two levels incongruous, Eugenides bridges this apparent gap by interweaving the strands of gender and ethnicity in the narrative, as his narrator sets out to construct his identity. The hyphenated being is the epitome of this Bildungsromanand novel of quest, both forms favored by ethnic literature. At the same time, Middlesex is a sort of epic which is a genre "generally associated with ethnogenesis, the emergence of a people, and can therefore seemingly be appropriated transnationally by all peoples," as Werner Sollors says in Beyond Ethnicity (Sollors 238).In this multigenerational saga, the Stephanides invent and construct their Americanness and their Greekness against a backdrop of an American society at grips with assimilation and multiculturalism, and a Greek community responding to these issues.
Analysis of Hermaphroditism in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2022
Middlesex, written by Jeffrey Eugenides, gives a memorable voice to one of those "coherent" gender beings. As Judith Butler mentions in one of her works, "If sex and gender are radically distinct, then it does not follow that to be a given sex is to become a given gender; in other words, "woman" need not be the cultural construction of the female body, and "man" need not interpret male bodies" (Butler 1999, 142). In short, this paper brings the chronological and biological defects that haunted Cal/Lie's growth as a whole person as opposed to the person she/he wanted to be. Adding to that, the novel deals with wide themes and narrative structures. Much research has focused on ethnography, cultural identity, and immigrant life in search of a home and all. This paper focused on the hermaphroditism of the main protagonist from the novel, who narrates the entire generational epic concluding with hers.
EUFONI, 2018
The 2003 Pulitzer Award"s winning novel Middlesex has been praised in the United States because it is considered to be successful in presenting new perspectives on gender through intersex character who rejects genital surgery. In addition to intersex, this novel also constructs the discourse of sexuality through incest and lesbian issue. This study is conducted to reveal how gender, sex, and sexuality are represented in the novel. Judith Butler"s concepts of gender, sex and sexuality are used in this study to understand how the author builds the discourse of incest, lesbian and intersex. In order to find out the author"s position regarding these issues, this study also aims to expose what factors have influenced the representation of gender, sex, and sexuality in the novel. The result of this study shows that this novel tends to strengthen the causality between gender, sex and sexuality by portraying lesbian and intersex as the other. Incest is depicted as something acceptable as long as it is successfully blurred the kinship and suggests consensual heterosexual relationship. While lesbian is represented as sexual deviant desire that is never accepted in the United States. Intersex which becomes the major issue of the novel is defined as an abnormality that is shameful and should be hidden. In order to be accepted in the United States, lesbian and intersex are required to transform into more coherent gender and sexuality to fulfill what Butler calls as compulsory heterosexuality. The representation of gender, sex, and sexuality in the novel are greatly influenced by the political, social, and cultural factors that developed in Greece, the United States, and Germany in the 20 th up to the beginning of 21st century. Furthermore, the discourse of lesbianism and intersexuality that flourished in America when the novel was published also has an effect on the representation of lesbian and intersex in the novel.
An Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides
Transatlantica, 2020
Jeffrey Eugenides’s debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published to major critical and popular acclaim in 1993. It has since been translated into thirty-four languages and adapted on screen by Sofia Coppola. His second novel, Middlesex (2002), was awarded the Pulitzer Price, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the French Prix Medici. The Marriage Plot (2011), his third novel to date, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. First published in various magazines (The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, etc.), Jeffrey Eugenides’s short stories were collected in Fresh Complaint in 2017. Eugenides is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. He has taught creative writing at both Princeton and NYU. In September 2018, Jeffrey Eugenides was a guest of the Festival America in Vincennes, France, where he kindly agreed to discuss his work with me. The interview was conducted by email between May and October 2020. https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/15228?lang=en
Sex, Gender, Sexuality: Subalternity in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex
International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 2020
In contrast with what is widely emphasized and academically discussed, subalternity emerges in a broad spectrum. The current research discusses sex, gender and sexuality as fertile grounds of subalternity in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. Although the Classical Marxist tradition submits “class” as the only narrative of oppression and inequality, Gramsci’s Marxism can account for a wider range of narratives, namely, sex, age, race, gender and sexual orientation, and, subsequently, replaces “the proletariat” with “the subalterns.” Gramsci divided superstructure in two parts (civil society and political society) and traced the footsteps of oppression and subordination through everyday lives by concepts such as “hegemony,” “civil society,” and “common sense.” As well as Gramsci, Judith Butler draws attention to the legislation of norms in the social domain. Heterosexuality, sexual dimorphism and masculine/feminine dichotomy are norms which are legislated and hegemonic through the institu...
Oblicza męskości / Faces of Masculinity, 2017
The paper aims to investigate the linguistic representation of intersexuality in Jeffrey Eugenides’s "Middlesex". First, the characteristics of intersex discourse are discussed and several substantial problems regarding the linguistic self-representation of an intersex individual are examined. Then, the gendered discourse in "Middlesex" is analysed with a view to uncovering the underlying patterns of gender perception by the novel’s narrator. As regards the methodology employed in this study, Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity is the primary analytical tool. Also, an adaptationist reading of Eugenides’s novel is offered. The analysis proper is divided into two major subsections, i.e., the investigation of gender at the macro-level and at the micro-level of text-making. The results obtained from this study have indicated that the subject of linguistic representation of intersexuality in discourse deserves an in-depth analysis in the future.
Modern Fiction Studies, 2016
This essay explores Jeffrey Eugenides playful engagement with the legacy of David Foster Wallace in his novel The Marriage Plot. It is no mere coincidence that the fictional character Leonard Bankhead resembles Wallace. Rather, by invoking Wallace so directly, Eugenides engages in an artistic “battle” with Wallace that both parodies Wallace’s own public battles with his postmodern forebears and also transforms Harold Bloom’s Oedipal model of artistic influence into a love triangle. As such, The Marriage Plot not only revives the traditional love story by enacting a metafictional parody of same but also playfully pits Eugenides against Wallace as rivals for the reader’s affection.