Postmodernism in Angela Carter’s Short Fiction: A Žižekian Approach

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to the academic dispute over the emancipatory potential of Angela Carter‘s fiction by examining the way in which her short fiction re-imagines and either reproduces or subverts the ideology at work in patriarchy. The relevance that the category ―postmodernism‖ has had for the critical reception of Carter‘s work determines this dissertation‘s three-part structure. The first part provides an overview of the standard theoretical perspectives that define postmodernism as a frame of ideas and as a literary practice and that, as such, have had a direct influence on the assessment of the political potential of Carter‘s fiction. Part II focuses on Slavoj Žižek‘s non-standard account of postmodernism, an approach that reasserts the subversive character of postmodernist cultural productions. Part III analyses a corpus of seven short narratives from Carter‘s four collections and examines the extent to which Žižek‘s unorthodox view of postmodernism sheds new light on the emancipatory potential of their representation of social reality, sexual difference and the human condition.