2021-02-16 at 17:49:40
Vanja Vukicevic Garic from University of Montenegro, Faculty of Philology
will present Textualizing the Survival and Re-contextualizing the “It“ in Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor
Abstract
Abstract: While clearly fitting into descriptions of dystopian, arcadian and (post-)apocalyptic genres (Rosenfeld, 2005), Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) can also be regarded as a psychological and self-conscious postmodernist narrative, in which the Ich-form of a memoir foregrounds the intriguing questions of the borderline between (personal) text and (social) context. The cause of the social and cultural breakdown in the novel is referred to as an unspecified “it” – an all-pervading menacing presence that changed everyone’s life.
This paper will focus on the interpretative possibilities to creatively re-define the threats posed by the external “it”, stressing out the internal “leap” of the narrator who textualizes her experience of the survival, transcending its limits in the process that, in Baudrillard’s terms, can be called the “symbolic exchange” (Baudrillard, 1976), which deconstructs the conventional life-death binary opposition. Keywords: (post-)apocalyptic, “it”, re-contextualization, self-conscious text, survival, transcendence.

In section
British and Commonwealth Literature