Goldsmiths, University of London

Graduate Student, English and Comparative Literature

Thesis Title: Arachne’s Daughters: Oral Tradition, Canon Formation and the Feminist Transformative Appropriation of Classical Texts

About

Research

My research looks at the way in which canon formation has been conceptualised in the past and how those conceptualisations have been recently deconstructed in order to test my thesis that canon construction does and has historically existed, in the powerful form of the ‘imaginary’ construct.

Canonical mythical traditions and their influence on new text production has been historically, and continues to be perceived as a real and male dominated one that propagates patriarchal ideologies in the works it disseminates through complex and dispersed networks of cultural institutions. This perceived male dominance of the written canonical text leads us to privilege the written text as ‘male’. Through this we tend to construct the ‘high art’ of the canonical text in opposition to oral literatures that we perceive as a ‘low art’ that is often associated with women. In this sense the textual field can be considered to be structured through a gendered tension between high and low, male and female textual elements that, for the purposes of a creative positioning, are used by authors to contest, rewrite and impose new ideological values on their earlier source texts.

My research specifically explores the processes and techniques by which feminist authors appropriate and rewrite canonical texts.



Education

BA Comparative Literary Studies (University of Kent)
MA Comparative Literatures (Goldsmiths, University of London)