Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學系 === 88 === Struggling with the social norms of gender and to be a ''visible'' woman writer, Marge Piercy challenges and interrogates the canonical, patriarchal hegemony that dominates the culture. Her work, Woman on the Edge of Time, invites multiple alternatives by imagining beyond what is taken for granted. This thesis aims to explore how the heroine''s time-travel undergoes a dialogic process between the past, present and future, which effects a feminist politics to examine the social norms and to anticipate a change toward an egalitarian world.
This thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter offers an overview of both the text and context of this novel. Since I define this novel as a generic mixture of feminist utopian writing and postmodern science fiction, I first introduce theories of postmodernism, feminism, science fiction, and utopian writing, and their intersections. The exploration of theories here paves the way for the textual analysis in later discussion. In the second chapter, I discuss how the writer manipulates postmodern strategies to express her feminist concerns of destabilizing the canon and enabling a dialogic interaction between the margin and the center. The third chapter focuses on key debates within feminist discourse, which are revealed and symbolized through the heroine''s telepathic experiences communicating between the dystopian present and the utopian future. The feminist thinking toward language, history, science/technology, ecology, gender/sexuality, and subjectivity is elaborated in this chapter. Finally, the concluding chapter reviews theories and issues concerning both postmodernist and feminist thinking highlighted through the heroine''s time-travel/mind-travel, which is a dialogic process bringing up different voices and perspectives--a voyage of rethinking and reshaping.
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