"Taken Bad" : Conspiracism and/as Sickness in Diane Johnson’s The Shadow Knows

WALSBERGEROVÁ, Tereza. "Taken Bad" : Conspiracism and/as Sickness in Diane Johnson’s The Shadow Knows. In New Pathways in Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies in Pandemic Times, November 20-21, 2020, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno. 2020.

Základní údaje

Originální název

"Taken Bad" : Conspiracism and/as Sickness in Diane Johnson’s The Shadow Knows

Autoři

WALSBERGEROVÁ, Tereza

Vydání

New Pathways in Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies in Pandemic Times, November 20-21, 2020, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, 2020

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Další údaje

Jazyk

angličtina

Typ výsledku

Prezentace na konferencích

Obor

60206 Specific literatures

Stát vydavatele

Česká republika

Utajení

není předmětem státního či obchodního tajemství

Odkazy

URL

Organizační jednotka

Filozofická fakulta

Klíčová slova anglicky

paranoia; American fiction; postmodernism; feminism; intersectional feminism; illness; Diane Johnson; The Shadow Knows

Příznaky

Mezinárodní význam

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Anotace

V originále

Narratives of sickness, disease, and contagion have been weaved into stories to shine a light on social issues since the 19th century when Victorian authors became interested in utilizing scientific paradigms. As C. C. Tarr asserts in “Infectious Fictions” (2015), what is known as “plague fiction” has maintained significance as it “exposes the chaos of social breakdowns to reveal that the economic and ideological barriers that society constructs are easily conquered by indiscriminate and capricious forces” (142). As this paper explores, postmodern fiction – and particularly postmodern American fiction – frequently depicts sickness as already inherent in the society to shine a light on various symptoms of the condition of postmodernity. In fact, more often than not, postmodern fiction uses narratives of physical sickness to represent postmodern suffering and help distinguish between how it is experienced from different perspectives. In these works, sickness can take on a number of forms – it can be mental or physical, contagious or isolated, apparent or inconspicuous, violent or peaceful – as it is parallel to one of the most corrosive symptoms of the condition of postmodernity: paranoia. Diane Johnson’s 1974 feminist novel The Shadow Knows presents its reader with two female characters, N. and Ev, who in many ways embody this parallel. This paper explores how the parallel of N’s conspiracism and Ev’s sickness plays out in the novel’s narrative, proposing that it exposes the racial divide of America’s 1970s feminism through the dichotomy of the mind and the body.

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Návaznosti

MUNI/A/1204/2019, interní kód MU

Název: Researching Communication in English: Paradigms, Strategies, Developments - II (Akronym: ReComE 2020) Investor: Masarykova univerzita, Researching Communication in English: Paradigms, Strategies, Developments - II, DO R. 2020_Kategorie A - Specifický výzkum - Studentské výzkumné projekty