An Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides

2019

This academic work connects the 1993 debut novel The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides to Freud’s concepts of life and death drives (from Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Ego and the Id), and the Uncanny, as well as theories of trauma by Cath Caruth, tracing a parallel between them. The aim is to look at how trauma influences the story, how psychoanalysis sees trauma related to suicide, and how the society in which one lives deals with this self-imposed death. The method used for this work was research in articles, journal issues in the field, and books. The data collected and analyzed through this research may help to build a better understanding of traumas, with a focus on suicidal related ones, and what this means to the novel, as well as how suicide can affect not only a family but a community. Keywords : The Virgin Suicides . Psychoanalysis. Trauma. Suicide. Death Drive.

The Journal of Academic Social Science Studies, 2018

Öz mit suicide one after another, consistently absence of identity is one of the reasons beyond their murder. This paper discusses the author's method and the similarity and differences between both of the books. It concentrates on the concept of identity in addition, the matter of gender is another concern of this article.

Atlantis, 2005

After locating US writer Jeffrey Eugenides against the background of recent minimalist fiction, this essay evaluates the influence of García Márquez's narratives Cien años de soledad and Crónica de una muerte anunciada on his first novel, The Virgin Suicides. Centered on the novel's magical-realist features, the contrastive analysis contends that The Virgin Suicides revives a distinctive modernist mythical impulse. Based on its literary borrowings, this impulse materializes in the endorsement of ancestral beliefs in a female principle and in the ethical demand to put an end to the gradual annihilation of the planet by post-industrial societies.

Atlantis / Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos, 2013

Th is paper off ers an analysis of Jeff rey Eugenides's debut novel Th e Virgin Suicides as a narrative of survival, uncertainty and coming to terms with traumatic experiences. It contends that the experimental narrator -a group of middle-aging men-participates in the diff erent traumatic events in a threefold way, as men who become bystanders, perpetrators and victims. Th e perspective off ered by Trauma Studies in the study of the novel points to the text's reticence to defi ne both its peculiar narrator and the enigma at the core of the narrator's story. Th e eff ects of such textual uncertainty are interpreted as a process of gradual realization of the collective trauma suff ered not only by the female protagonists but also by the would-be narrator of the story and by the whole community of Grosse Pointe.

EUFONI, 2018

The 2003 Pulitzer Award"s winning novel Middlesex has been praised in the United States because it is considered to be successful in presenting new perspectives on gender through intersex character who rejects genital surgery. In addition to intersex, this novel also constructs the discourse of sexuality through incest and lesbian issue. This study is conducted to reveal how gender, sex, and sexuality are represented in the novel. Judith Butler"s concepts of gender, sex and sexuality are used in this study to understand how the author builds the discourse of incest, lesbian and intersex. In order to find out the author"s position regarding these issues, this study also aims to expose what factors have influenced the representation of gender, sex, and sexuality in the novel. The result of this study shows that this novel tends to strengthen the causality between gender, sex and sexuality by portraying lesbian and intersex as the other. Incest is depicted as something acceptable as long as it is successfully blurred the kinship and suggests consensual heterosexual relationship. While lesbian is represented as sexual deviant desire that is never accepted in the United States. Intersex which becomes the major issue of the novel is defined as an abnormality that is shameful and should be hidden. In order to be accepted in the United States, lesbian and intersex are required to transform into more coherent gender and sexuality to fulfill what Butler calls as compulsory heterosexuality. The representation of gender, sex, and sexuality in the novel are greatly influenced by the political, social, and cultural factors that developed in Greece, the United States, and Germany in the 20 th up to the beginning of 21st century. Furthermore, the discourse of lesbianism and intersexuality that flourished in America when the novel was published also has an effect on the representation of lesbian and intersex in the novel.

International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 2020

In contrast with what is widely emphasized and academically discussed, subalternity emerges in a broad spectrum. The current research discusses sex, gender and sexuality as fertile grounds of subalternity in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. Although the Classical Marxist tradition submits “class” as the only narrative of oppression and inequality, Gramsci’s Marxism can account for a wider range of narratives, namely, sex, age, race, gender and sexual orientation, and, subsequently, replaces “the proletariat” with “the subalterns.” Gramsci divided superstructure in two parts (civil society and political society) and traced the footsteps of oppression and subordination through everyday lives by concepts such as “hegemony,” “civil society,” and “common sense.” As well as Gramsci, Judith Butler draws attention to the legislation of norms in the social domain. Heterosexuality, sexual dimorphism and masculine/feminine dichotomy are norms which are legislated and hegemonic through the institu...

Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2022

Middlesex, written by Jeffrey Eugenides, gives a memorable voice to one of those "coherent" gender beings. As Judith Butler mentions in one of her works, "If sex and gender are radically distinct, then it does not follow that to be a given sex is to become a given gender; in other words, "woman" need not be the cultural construction of the female body, and "man" need not interpret male bodies" (Butler 1999, 142). In short, this paper brings the chronological and biological defects that haunted Cal/Lie's growth as a whole person as opposed to the person she/he wanted to be. Adding to that, the novel deals with wide themes and narrative structures. Much research has focused on ethnography, cultural identity, and immigrant life in search of a home and all. This paper focused on the hermaphroditism of the main protagonist from the novel, who narrates the entire generational epic concluding with hers.

Journal of American Studies, 2010