Archive

Special issues:

Literature and Linguistics (Vol. 1 No. 2); Literature and Violence (Vol. 3 Nos. 1-2)

Women, Consumption and Popular Culture (Vol. 4 No. 1); Life, Community, and Ethics (Vol. 4. No. 2)

The Making of Barbarians in Western Literature (Vol. 5 No. 1); Chaos and Fear in Contemporary British Literature (Vol. 5 No. 2)

Taiwan Cinema before Taiwan New Wave Cinema (Vol. 6 No. 1); Catastrophe and Cultural Imaginaries (Vol. 6 No. 2)

Affective Perspectives from East Asia (Vol. 9 No. 2); Longing and Belonging (Vol. 10 No. 2, produced in collaboration with the European Network for Comparative Literary Studies)

Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, 1776 to the Present (Vol. 11 No. 2). 

ABSTRACT

Virginia Woolf has become a model of the foremother in Modernist literature and her works have also had a profound influence on later postmodernist works and various film adaptations. Among Woolf’s works, Mrs. Dalloway offers a visionary interpretation to construct a Kleinian matricentric world to replace Freudian paternal genealogies. Bearing this as a major focus, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours contributes to conceptualize Woolf’s maternal aura into a postmodernist re interpretation of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway by weaving it as a world of female genealogy in the multicultural cities located from the continent to the Untied States. The essay, thus, presents a comprehensive study of Stephen Daldry’s cinematic version, The Hours, along with David Hare’s same name script as the major contexts to concentrate on Woolf’s rhetoric of m/other with psychoanalytic feminist approaches, namely Melanie Klein’s object-relations and Julia Kristeva’s abject. Contrary to the dominant oedipal focused concepts, the genealogical project of psychological mothering, thus, has shaped an alternative view on mapping the possible world of female phantasies.

KEY WORDS: phantasies, the paranoid-schizoid position, the depressive position, anxiety-situations, breast, abject