Description
This thesis focuses on five texts written in the English language, from various time periods, including, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Angela Carter's A Passion of New Eve, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and Edward Gorey's A Curious Sofa and The West Wing that bring to the fore greater philosophical questions about one's subjective relation to the world through their attention to the process of imaginative assemblage. How do the aesthetic forms of these texts create imaginative spaces of possibility? In other words, how do the authors' imaginative assemblages create this possibility space for the reader? What happens when texts become difficult to categorize according to their aesthetic form? What sorts of boundaries are crossed through the form? These over-arching questions are explored throughout this thesis in relation to how the texts' aesthetic forms contribute to how the content is received and perceived. Primarily using various psychoanalytic ideas, along with insight from queer and feminist theory, this thesis uses a range of philosophy to examine how these various texts allow for freedom in exploring one's identity outside of dominant ideologies and oppositional binary divides. The thesis questions the ways in which the creative process occurs -- how this monstrous space of freedom is created -- and how it can become a space of healing by deconstructing dualities such as reality/fantasy, male/female, author/reader, subject/object, fact/fiction, and conscious/unconscious.
