Doublethink

Susan Winnett –Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure

1. Works to deconstruct Peter Brooks’s “Freud’s Masterplot”, an article that emphasizes the male as the dominant sexual being and subsequently that the composition of a literary narrative is centered around the details of masculine sexual intercourse.

2. Discusses the idea of relating sexual intercourse to a novel’s progression, such that the build-up and climax of the sexual act is directly linked to the literary ideas of the same name.

3. Talks about the novel of Frankenstein and the idea of Frankenstein as a mother and how the novel focuses on the “after-birth”, a more feminine concept, rather than the initial conception, which is a more masculine-dominated area.

4. Discusses the replacing of a male sexual model as it corresponds to the narrative with a female one that focuses on female climax and its difference from that of a man (with regards to the theme and story as well)

5. Encourages a paradigm shift in though in literary criticism in general from male-dominated (and male-assumed) criticism in every sense to a more gender-neutral or feminine look into literature and the narrative