Kuvaus
How to tell the Self from the Other? This positivist anxiety was effectively displaced by the nineteenth-century criminology when it promised to capture the elusive subject of crime in a morphology of otherness but only to admit of its speculative open-endedness. The Other’s monstrosity stands to be captured, seemingly forever, as the narrative counterpart of the Self’s metamorphic potential. Notably, in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (R.L. Stevenson, 1886), the respectable doctor’s entanglement with the monstrous Hyde reminds us what we already remember: the subversive potential of metamorphosis does not admit of any stable otherness. What does Jekyll desire if not the Jekyll-within, precisely where his respectable self is framed by the Victorian anxiety of the ‘dark secrets within respectability’? At hand, the proposed paper suggests, is a productive desire that takes the narrative form of metamorphosis. The personas Hyde and Jekyll are inextricable from each other not just narratively but also as the two poles of a process in which one goes on to invent one’s own, reversible ‘other.’ Drawing from Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of schizorevolutionary process, it is argued that we could be thriving on the open secrets within, as a narrative failure that suggests political success—a metamorphic estrangement to the inescapable morphology of otherness. Just as D&G uproot the ‘schizo’ from its clinical illness, Stevenson extracts Hyde from its criminological otherness to re-imagine him as a personification of the metamorphic destiny we might be strangely familiar with.| Aikajakso | 30 kesäk. 2023 |
|---|---|
| Tapahtuman otsikko | Current Research in Speculative Fiction - 12th Annual Conference |
| Tapahtuman tyyppi | Konferenssi |
| Sijainti | Liverpool, Iso-BritanniaNäytä kartalla |