Books by Christina Dokou
Papers by Christina Dokou
Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media, Dec 29, 2020
World Literature Today, 2010
Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture
This paper aims to explore from a technofeminist standpoint this failure to enunciate a ‘feminine... more This paper aims to explore from a technofeminist standpoint this failure to enunciate a ‘feminine’ technoscientific praxis in the Puttermesser and Xanthippe episode of Cynthia Ozick’s 1997 ‘serial’ novel The Puttermesser Papers. In particular, there is a tragic failure to integrate procreative ethos and creative technoscience: when the latter is placed in the service of the former, the curse of Frankenstein rears its ugly head, and catastrophe ensues. The female scientist, a Jewish polymath like Ruth Puttermesser who creates a female golem to save New York, in releasing procreativity from the necessity of heterosexual reproduction, unwittingly unleashes a plague of ‘hyperfemininity’ that threatens to destroy culture. Thus, the break from the biological restraints of procreation and the establishment of a utopian femarche (female rule) are deconstructed, parodied, and retrospectively opposed as destructive, while the figure of the female savant / scientist emerges as a tragic one, to...
Mito y ciencia ficción, 2021, ISBN 978-84-18888-12-0, págs. 103-112, 2021
World Literature Today, 2009
World Literature Today, 2015
The influence exerted on contemporary women poets (as women and as artists), by the patriarchal t... more The influence exerted on contemporary women poets (as women and as artists), by the patriarchal traditions of the canon is examined here through the comparative analysis of selected works by Anghelaki-Rooke and Vakalo. The particularities of the Greek cultural context are, of course, accounted for; however, the investigation focuses mainly on tracing and analysing within the poems elements which contemporary feminist theory would identify as constituents of écriture féminine. The term, a product of the "French" feminism of Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Κristeva, denotes textual markers such as body-centered thematics; an experimental attitude towards language, form and meaning; use of circular time; references to the bonds of motherhood; a fluidity of identity; and an exploration of feminine sensibility – all of which not only appear in, but essentially characterize the work of the two Greek women poets. If, however, the exercise of écriture féminine is an act of ...
The Letter of the Law: Literature, Justice and the Other
This paper aims at a comparative analysis of the dress code in two plays by contemporary American... more This paper aims at a comparative analysis of the dress code in two plays by contemporary American women playwrights, newyorican Migdalia Cruz’s 1995 Fur and African-American Lynn Nottage’s 2005 Intimate Apparel . The minority status of both playwrights becomes an autobiographical impetus for each play, where the contrast between performative nakedness and clothing serves as an extended metaphor for the mainstream American politics of labeling, cannibalizing, and attempting to culturally assimilate the Other. The many forms by which Otherness appears in the plays—the freak, the marginal, the female, the poor, the single, the minority, the immigrant—are interwoven to show the complexity of identity issues stemming from a world violently (almost post-apocalyptically) thrown together by the capitalist globalized maelstrom. These find in the innovative interplay of nakedness and dress an ideally “suited” code to speak for that which, like our naked physicality, is always darkly proximate...
The Letter of the Law: Literature, Justice and the Other
Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, 2008
Yet if reading must not be content with doubling the text, it cannot legitimately transgress the ... more Yet if reading must not be content with doubling the text, it cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a signified outside the text whose content could take place, could have taken place outside of language, that is to say...outside of writing in general. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Now, the question to be asked is, why is it that we prefer the replica to the original? Why does it give us the greater frisson? To understand this, we must understand and confront our insecurity, our existential indecision, the profound atavistic fear we experience when we are face to face with the original...which appears most powerful and therefore threatens us... Now, there is the representation-let me fracture that word, the representation-of the world. It is not a substitute for that plain and primitive world, but an enhancement and enrichment, an ironisation and summation of that world. ...A monochrome world has become Technicolor, a single croaking speaker has become wraparound sound. Is this our loss? No, it is our conquest, our victory.
Σύγκριση, 2017
Το άρθρο εξετάζει συγκριτικά τη χρήση της Ομηρικής μορφής της Πηνελόπης, πιστής συζύγου του Οδυσσ... more Το άρθρο εξετάζει συγκριτικά τη χρήση της Ομηρικής μορφής της Πηνελόπης, πιστής συζύγου του Οδυσσέα, στα κλασικά αριστουργήματα δύο συγχρόνων κατόχων του Νόμπελ Λογοτεχνίας: τα Εκατό Χρόνια Μοναξιά του Κολομβιανού μυθιστοριογράφου Γκαμπριέλ Γκαρσία Μάρκεζ και το μεγάλο ποίημα Όμηρος του ποιητή της Καραϊβικής, Ντέρεκ Ουώλκοττ. Η ανάλυση επικεντρώνεται στα στοιχεία που αφορούν στο περίφημο τέχνασμα της Πηνελόπης να κερδίσει χρόνο από τους μνηστήρες υφαίνοντας και ξε-υφαίνοντας το σάβανο του πεθερού της, Λαέρτη, δείχνοντας το πώς τα στοιχεία αυτά, οι ερμηνείες και οι συνδέσεις τους αξιοποιούνται από τους μεταγενέστερους καλλιτέχνες για να αναπλάσουν την - θετική για τον Ουώλκοττ, αρνητική για τον Μάρκεζ - εικόνα της ανυφάντρας που περιμένει και κάνει σχέδια σε έναν αγώνα ενάντια στο χρόνο και τη δύσκολη θέση της. Μέσα από αυτή τη διαδικασία, η Πηνελόπη αναδεικνύεται από δευτερεύων χαρακτήρας σε μετωνυμία όχι μόνο για πανύπτες προφήτες και θεότητες μέσα στα ίδια τα κείμενα, αλλά και για...
The Letter of the Law: Literature, Justice and the Other
The Future of Flesh, 2009
... Page 160. 144 Christina Dokou Dr. Frankenstein to destroy his female animant while still at t... more ... Page 160. 144 Christina Dokou Dr. Frankenstein to destroy his female animant while still at the creation stage75 is fear of female sexuality as such. A woman who is sexually liberated, free to choose her own life, her own sexual partner (by force, if necessary). ...
Amaltea: Revista de Mitocrítica, 2017
Presented as the conciliatory voice of wisdom, Teiresias, the blind theban seer who had been both... more Presented as the conciliatory voice of wisdom, Teiresias, the blind theban seer who had been both man and woman, exemplifies how transcending gender can lead to a questioning of normative, victimizing cultural mandates within the polis. This gender-bending acquires further applications in the 2003 film, Tiresia, about the myth-informed travails of a transsexual brazilian illegal immigrant prostitute in france. The film daringly deconstructs the dividing lines within contemporary globalized flows: immigrants vs. citizens, men vs. women, dogma vs. humanity. The performative gender of "tiresia" exposes but also exacerbates the effects of cultural violence, yet also intimates peaceful alternatives.
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Books by Christina Dokou
Papers by Christina Dokou