Skip to content Skip to navigation
University of Warwick
  • Study
  • |
  • Research
  • |
  • Business
  • |
  • Alumni
  • |
  • News
  • |
  • About

University of Warwick
Publications service & WRAP

Highlight your research

  • WRAP
    • Home
    • Search WRAP
    • Browse by Warwick Author
    • Browse WRAP by Year
    • Browse WRAP by Subject
    • Browse WRAP by Department
    • Browse WRAP by Funder
    • Browse Theses by Department
  • Publications Service
    • Home
    • Search Publications Service
    • Browse by Warwick Author
    • Browse Publications service by Year
    • Browse Publications service by Subject
    • Browse Publications service by Department
    • Browse Publications service by Funder
  • Help & Advice
University of Warwick

The Library

  • Login
  • Admin

'Suicide or dynamite' : Sophie Podolski’s le pays où tout est permis

Tools
- Tools
+ Tools

Grundy, David (2016) 'Suicide or dynamite' : Sophie Podolski’s le pays où tout est permis. Contemporary Women's Writing, 10 (2). pp. 175-196. doi:10.1093/cww/vpv032

Research output not available from this repository, contact author.
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpv032

Request Changes to record.

Abstract

Most readers are likely to have come across the out-of-print and untranslated work of the Belgian author Sophie Podolski primarily through her brief appearances in pieces by Robert Bolaño and thus to perceive her as a gifted but tragic artist-victim, a poétesse maudite whose associative flow, graphic style, and often tortured self-awareness is of a piece with her suicide at the age of twenty-one. Podolski becomes a martyr to the sexual and collective ideals of the 1960s’ counterculture, a version of Artaud’s Van Gogh, a woman suicided by society. Yet such a characterization does a disservice to her own writings, which anticipate the very process of mythification in which they also participate, not only in terms of the writer-as-martyr ideal, but also in terms of the political limitations of a hippie “drop-out” lifestyle. This essay addresses, in particular, her questioning of the perversion or disguise of the free-love ideal as a kind of crude, misogynistic sexual “communism,” as epitomized by the relation between Charles Manson and his “family”; of the limitations of nonviolence, in relation to the Living Theater; of the recuperation of the protest movements of May 1968; and of the seeking after of consciousness-altering modes of relation to the human collective and to the world in general through the taking of hallucinogenic drugs. It explores the ways in which such simultaneous desire and deflation, at once tortured and comic, place the political and sexual paradoxes faced by experimental women writers and experimental women’s writing in sharp relief.

Item Type: Journal Article
Divisions: Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies
Journal or Publication Title: Contemporary Women's Writing
Publisher: OUP
ISSN: 1754-1476
Official Date: July 2016
Dates:
DateEvent
July 2016Published
13 November 2015Available
19 August 2015Accepted
Volume: 10
Number: 2
Page Range: pp. 175-196
DOI: 10.1093/cww/vpv032
Status: Peer Reviewed
Publication Status: Published
Access rights to Published version: Restricted or Subscription Access

Request changes or add full text files to a record

Repository staff actions (login required)

View Item View Item
twitter

Email us: wrap@warwick.ac.uk
Contact Details
About Us