Breaking Boundaries in Contemporary Women’s Writing: A Review Essay

The two books reviewed here are the initial contributions to a series edited by Gill Rye with publisher Peter Lang, Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing . Rye and Amaleena Damlé set the tone for the inaugural volume with their presentation of a truly eye-opening sequence of studies by twelve scholars on francophone women authors in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In volume two, Katie Jones writes a focused exploration on the question of disgust, addressing both French and German women writers, covering part of the same period. Both volumes are solid works of scholarship that explore timely issues in a corpus of known and lesser-known writers of the present and thus both set benchmarks for future researchers. As a reader not terribly attracted to the repulsive but curious about the ambivalence it generates, I will surmount my personal sensitivities and commence with Jones’s study. Katie Jones’s Representing Repulsion presents a convincing analysis of how the category of the disgusting has been formulated, represented, and employed across time, by theorists from Kant to Darwin to Sartre and, particularly, by women writers since the 1990s in the works of authors as varied as Amélie Nothomb and Alina Reyes in France to Charlotte Roche and Jenny Erpenbeck in Germany. Originally, a doctoral thesis, the study is at once systematic, laying out the issues for the nonspecialist in cogent prose, and creative, bringing together authors and ideas through a stimulating series of contrasts and comparisons. Jones argues that, as a transhistorical phenomenon, the category of the disgusting carries with it layers of philosophical, anthropological, aesthetic, moral, and broadly political accretion, not all of which have been readily illustrated in literature because, especially in earlier periods, a dominant aesthetic of the beautiful or the pleasing often precluded its representation. She organizes her study over five chapters: the theoretical layers are teased out in an opening chapter before proceeding in the four subsequent chapters to an investigation of how they might be connected to contemporary literary texts. Chapter 1, “Towards a Literary Theory of Disgust,” is the densest reading of the whole study, but it has its logical place in the argument. It moves from the subheading “An Ambiguous Emotion: Kolnai’s and William Ian Miller’s Typologies of Disgust” (14) to sections on cultural anthropology (Darwin and Douglas), psychoanalysis and identity formation (Freud and Kristeva), emotion and morality (Nussbaum and Knapp), and, finally, into existential revelation (Nietzsche and Sartre). In her analysis, Jones demonstrates that, although transgressive by nature, the disgusting paradoxically often reinforces the boundaries it breaks. Through a dynamic of defense and offense examined through different discourses and over time, she traces how transgressive acts generate various consequences (moral, social, and aesthetic) as limits are breached. Indeed, Jones notes that one of the most striking changes in the contemporary period is that disgust has moved from an assumed role of disruptor of artistic representation to being studied “in its own right as an integral feature of aesthetic experience” (64). In this respect, identifying that sensations of repulsion take place as much in the body as in the imagination opens the door for this scholar to step through and examine, in her subsequent chapters, the “narrative, linguistic and metaphorical strategies” (68) authors use in their writing to pass between bodily sensation and the mind.

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