2010/07/19 by Aliki Varvogli · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Aesthetics #Art #Contemporary Literature and Criticism #Dystopia #Empathy #Gender studies #Gender, Feminism, and Media #Ideology #Irony #Law #Literature #Narcissism #Narrative #Philosophy #Political science #Politics #Postmodernism #Psychoanalysis #Psychology #Social psychology #Sociology #Storytelling #Subversion #Theme (computing) #Themes in Literature Analysis #Viewpoints
paper · doi:10.1017/s0021875810001313
openalex publication_date 2010/07/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
This article discusses constructions and representations of motherhood in Russell Banks's The Darling and Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document . It argues that the theme of motherhood has a long, if often overlooked, presence in American literature, and that the two novelists use the figure of the mother in order to engage with the themes of empathy and community. The novels participate in familiar postmodernist practices, such as multiple, fragmented viewpoints and narratives, unreliable narrators, non-chronological storytelling and the mingling of fact and fiction. However, they do not wholeheartedly embrace two key postmodern issues: irony and loss of affect. Instead, they seek to move away from some of the postmodern novel's more excessive decathecting tendencies, and they achieve that through their representations of mothers who, in not acquiescing to society's norms, challenge gender roles and cultural assumptions. The two fictional mothers under discussion share a past as Weather Underground activists, and in giving voice to them and refusing to demonize them as “bad” mothers, their creators also seek to expose other American narratives that reinforce dominant ideology and suppress the margins.