She Unnames Them

She Unnames Them

1. Postmodernism

   • New fiction
     • fabulation/Magic Realism
       • fantasy for reconsideration and reimagination of women's position
   • "Me Decade": short-story realist style

2. themes

   • fallacy of human superiority
   • rewriting as an approach to cultural forces of power relations
   • contestation of authority
   • discourses of difference and power
   • power relations: God as a creator of life, Adam as namer (patriarchal structures)
   • telling woman's part of the story, excluded from creative and linguistic power
   • unnaming herself rejects the role and cultural connection that the name casts on her
     • demolishes the barriers of dominance
   • language as an obstacle
     • a barrier relegating Eve and animals to generic functions in service of Adam's needs
     • ideal where hunter and hunted cant be distinguished
   • ecofeminism
     • similarities between rights of women and animals, all kinds of oppression emanate from the same source

3. devices

   • retelling of the myth of Genesis
     • subversion of mythical construction that justifies discourses of difference and power
   • intertextuality
     • Intertextual theory: all texts belong to an immense matrix where they are connected by common reading and writing practices
   • Bildungsroman
   • allusion, quotation
   • parody
   • ideological paralimpsest
     • offers silenced or ignored point of view
   • binary oppositions: she/he, them/us
   • lacks spatial or temporal details (postlapsarian condition)
   • mock tone deprives story from religious overtones
   • results in an utopian vision of power relations
   • in betweenness accentuated by surrealist elements and domestic affairs