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The IUP Journal of English Studies :
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Abstract |
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Culture is an ensemble of narratives held together by collective memories and habitualized forms of storytelling. Cultural narratology explores the ways in which the formal properties of novels manifest the covert mental assumptions and cultural practices and form cultural identities of a given period. But the medley of voices burrowing for a cultural space is no longer remediated just linguistically but is represented in its veritable form as a cacophony of multimodal signifiers such as space, typography, layout, color, visual images, non-sequential reading pathways, tactility, etc. Woman’s World, a collage novel by British artist, Graham Rawle, has been created entirely from fragments of text clipped from the 1960s women’s magazines and invokes the narrator Norma’s obsession with these magazines and traverses the psyche of the narrator in search of a stable identity. It is also a cultural archive of the fashion and life style obsessed. Norma’s transgendered narrative voice emerges out of the collaged shards of text through a mosaic of prescriptive high society magazine directives on who a woman is and what a woman should be. This paper analyzes the feminine voices warped by the peppy wisdom and inane optimism of the 1960s women’s magazines and the distorted voice of transvestite Roy cross-dressing as Norma wedged in the gendered fetters of modern society. Cultural narratology interspersed with gender studies is used to study the cut-out text and visual artifacts for the cultural and stylistic innuendoes of the magazinespeak and the clustered identity of the narrator reappropriated through the collage novel. |
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