Writing as becoming-woman: Deleuzian/Guattarian reading of women’s prose

Jūratė Baranova

doi:10.1080/23311983.2020.1740530

Abstract

The methodological approach and starting point for this article are the idea of the difference between men and women creators as suggested and discussed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. As Del...

Highlights

The methodological approach and starting point for this article are the idea of the difference between men and women creators as suggested and discussed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the case of writing as becoming-woman using the example of Virginia Woolf
The peculiarities of women’s writing are: the ability to move at molecular speed; molecular movements presuppose writing as a rhizome: writing in heterogeneous streams

Summary

Introduction

As Deleuze and Guattari discuss the case of becoming-woman using the example of Virginia Woolf, her creative work is a subject of reflection This distinction is applied to reveal the special case of becoming-woman in the prose of Lithuanian writer Giedra Radvilavičiūtė (b.1960) who has published two books of short stories: The Planned Moments (2004) and Tonight I Will Sleep Near the Wall (2010) and one of literary critique: Persecution of the Texts. One of her essays, The Allure of the Text, was included in the anthology Best European Fiction 2010; in 2012 she was the laureate of the European Union for Literature. They start from the dichotomy of the two sexes: “We know that many beings pass between a man and a woman; they come from different worlds, are borne on the wind, form rhizomes around roots; they cannot be understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 242)

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Conclusion