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The IUP Journal of English Studies :
Cut-Up Voices in Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World
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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.

 
 
 

Diverse cultures seek disparate forms of forging narratives through which to disseminate their cultural norms. The semiotic prepotency of narratives makes it a prodigious repository of cultural practices and norms. Narratives are memorial reservoirs which are vehicles of social reconstruction as well as social regimentation. Dominant cultural discourses are either supplemented or challenged by the narratives and are evidenced in their resistance or subversion to conformist structure and modes. According to Helms (2003), cultural narratology explores “cultural experiences translated into, and meanings produced by, particular formal narrative practices”. In this, the formal patchy in parts but perfect as a whole—just like a collage. Just as Rawle transmogrifies language and modes to appropriate his narrative, modern society with its collage of spaces is adept at stretching the limits to incorporate the culturally deranged, the socially degendered and the stylistically incongruent.

 
 
 

English Studies Journal, Cut-Up Voices, Graham Rawle, novel’s narrator, Norma Fontaine,‘brother’, Roy,‘gender’, ‘happiness’, Woman’s World.