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UBC Theses and Dissertations
At an impasse : the possibilities of feminist resistance in Han Kang’s Ch’aeshikjuŭija and Deborah Smith’s The Vegetarian Willsie, Jane
Abstract
In 2016, The Vegetarian—Deborah Smith’s English version of South Korean author Han Kang’s novel 채식주의자 (Ch’aeshikchuŭija)—won the International Booker Prize, resulting in heightened discourse among both Western and Korean reviewers and literary scholars on the novel’s dark and bizarrely surreal story of an ordinary woman whose vegetarianism spirals into psychosis when she begins to believe she is becoming a tree. The aim of this thesis is to examine the possibilities of radical feminist resistance through madness in The Vegetarian’s depiction of a burgeoning psychosis that takes place in a metamorphosis of the body that is readable both as a sublime transformation into the nonhuman and pathological insanity leading to starvation. The main body of this thesis is an examination of some feminist theory’s historical omission of biology from discussions of affect, leading, I shall argue, to a tendency in some feminist scholarship on female madness to prioritize symbolic depictions of the body over anatomical ones. This tendency is in turn then linked to scholarship on The Vegetarian that reads the novel symbolically, leading to discussions of its protagonist that focus on the possibilities or failures of her metamorphosis/psychosis as radical resistance. Using Silvan Tomkins’ theory of affects as “amplifiers” that motivate or suppress the fulfillment of biological drives, this thesis argues that the protagonist’s metamorphosis is catalyzed and motivated by an affective reaction to trauma that takes real anatomical form. Turning to Elizabeth Wilson’s theory of the psychic capabilities of the body, what she terms the “biological unconscious” this thesis then constructs a framework for reading The Vegetarian that centers the biological motivations for her metamorphosis. Seeing affect as a mechanism that has biological implications, and not just discursive ones, this thesis concludes that the protagonist’s entanglement of symbolic meaning and bodily destruction in her metamorphosis is not an expression of the possibilities of feminist resistance, but an elucidation of the impasse that results from being unable to escape or change a society in which one can no longer live.
Item Metadata
Title |
At an impasse : the possibilities of feminist resistance in Han Kang’s Ch’aeshikjuŭija and Deborah Smith’s The Vegetarian
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Creator | |
Supervisor | |
Publisher |
University of British Columbia
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Date Issued |
2022
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Description |
In 2016, The Vegetarian—Deborah Smith’s English version of South Korean author Han Kang’s novel 채식주의자 (Ch’aeshikchuŭija)—won the International Booker Prize, resulting in heightened discourse among both Western and Korean reviewers and literary scholars on the novel’s dark and bizarrely surreal story of an ordinary woman whose vegetarianism spirals into psychosis when she begins to believe she is becoming a tree. The aim of this thesis is to examine the possibilities of radical feminist resistance through madness in The Vegetarian’s depiction of a burgeoning psychosis that takes place in a metamorphosis of the body that is readable both as a sublime transformation into the nonhuman and pathological insanity leading to starvation. The main body of this thesis is an examination of some feminist theory’s historical omission of biology from discussions of affect, leading, I shall argue, to a tendency in some feminist scholarship on female madness to prioritize symbolic depictions of the body over anatomical ones. This tendency is in turn then linked to scholarship on The Vegetarian that reads the novel symbolically, leading to discussions of its protagonist that focus on the possibilities or failures of her metamorphosis/psychosis as radical resistance. Using Silvan Tomkins’ theory of affects as “amplifiers” that motivate or suppress the fulfillment of biological drives, this thesis argues that the protagonist’s metamorphosis is catalyzed and motivated by an affective reaction to trauma that takes real anatomical form. Turning to Elizabeth Wilson’s theory of the psychic capabilities of the body, what she terms the “biological unconscious” this thesis then constructs a framework for reading The Vegetarian that centers the biological motivations for her metamorphosis. Seeing affect as a mechanism that has biological implications, and not just discursive ones, this thesis concludes that the protagonist’s entanglement of symbolic meaning and bodily destruction in her metamorphosis is not an expression of the possibilities of feminist resistance, but an elucidation of the impasse that results from being unable to escape or change a society in which one can no longer live.
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Genre | |
Type | |
Language |
eng
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Date Available |
2022-07-29
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Provider |
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
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Rights |
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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DOI |
10.14288/1.0416489
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URI | |
Degree | |
Program | |
Affiliation | |
Degree Grantor |
University of British Columbia
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Graduation Date |
2022-11
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Campus | |
Scholarly Level |
Graduate
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Rights URI | |
Aggregated Source Repository |
DSpace
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Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International