“Legs apart as the tide came in”: Fluid Sexual Personae of Ann Quin

• Název práce v češtině: „Příliv vnikl do roznoží“: Fluidní sexuální persony Ann Quin
• Název v anglickém jazyce: “Legs apart as the tide came in”: Fluid Sexual Personae of Ann Quin
• Klíčová slova: Ann Quin|britská avantgarda šedesátých let 20. století|experimentální próza|sexualita|britské spisovatelky
• Klíčová slova anglicky: Ann Quin|1960s British avantgarde|experimental fiction|sexuality|British women writers
• Akademický rok vypsání: 2022/2023
• Typ práce: diplomová práce
• Jazyk práce: angličtina
• Ústav: Ústav anglofonních literatur a kultur (21-UALK)
• Vedoucí / školitel: Mgr. David Vichnar, Ph.D.
• Řešitel: skrytý - zadáno a potvrzeno stud. odd.
• Datum přihlášení: 02.03.2023
• Datum zadání: 02.03.2023
• Schválení administrátorem: bylo schváleno
• Datum potvrzení stud. oddělením: 02.03.2023
• Datum a čas obhajoby: 06.09.2023 00:00
• Datum odevzdání elektronické podoby: 09.08.2023
• Datum proběhlé obhajoby: 06.09.2023
• Odevzdaná/finalizovaná: odevzdaná studentem a finalizovaná
• Oponenti: Louis Armand, Ph.D.

Zásady pro vypracování

This MA thesis examines how sensuality and sexuality are explored in the works of Ann Quin, specifically focusing on her characters as sexed and sexual beings. Throughout Quin’s oeuvre, there is an emergence of “sexual personae” which are constructed through various dynamics and relational structures. The thesis engages mainly with her four novels Berg, Three, Passages, Tripticks and the short fiction from the collection of Quin’s stories and fragments The Unmapped Country, with closer attention paid to the stories called “Nude and Seascape,” “A Double Room,” “Tripticks,” “Never Trust a Man Who Bathes with His Fingernails,” “Ghostworm” and the titular fragment of her unfinished novel The Unmapped Country.
The style and imagery of Ann Quin can be described in terms of their “liquid” character, her poetics being largely formed by the ever-present bodies of water which evoke an “erotic” dimension of her writing, suggesting the fluidity of her approach to sex.[1]Her eroticism is manifested by implied, metaphorical, as well as graphically explicit means. Quin offers a wide variety of sexual dynamics and practices, often violent in nature, including (semi)incestual relations, emphasis of the age gap between the lovers, sadomasochism, or non-monogamous arrangements.
This thesis operates within the framework of psychoanalysis and sexuality studies, departing from the founding texts by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault where relevant, while engaging with more specific studies dedicated to sadomasochism and aesthetics of eroticism. The aim of this thesis is to map the tendencies and often recurring themes in Quin’s approach to sensuality and sexuality in her works, exploring their variations and how they are manifested in the form of specific personae.
Each of Quin’s works will be observed in the context of individual phenomena – each chapter and subchapter will be dedicated to a certain element of her fiction that relates to the portrayal of the expressions of sexuality. The themes that this thesis engages with are the role of the family in sexual development of Quin’s characters, the gender motivations of sexual behaviors as well as the discussion of gender and sex in relation to writing, the various love triangles and “throuples” that appear throughout her work, and violent sexuality, as violence can be found in sexual, as well as non-sexual context in most of Quin’s works, and is crucial for the interpretation of her characters.

[1]“No one makes water more sexual than Quin: the sea, the river, the wash basin, the hot-spring pool, the hotel shower, the swimming pool. Sun, moon, vegetation, the wind, potentially erotic, are almost inevitably sexually charged in her work.” Philip Stevick, “Voices in the Head: Style and Consciousness in the Fiction of Ann Quin,” in: Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, edited by Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) 235.

Seznam odborné literatury

Secondary sources
Battaile, Georges. Death and Sensuality. A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo. Translated by Mary Dalwood. New York: Walker and Company, 1962.
Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Translated by Brian Singer. Montréal: New World Perspectives
CultureTexts Series, 2001.
Buckeye, Robert. Re: Quin. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013. EPUB.
Byrne, Romana. Aesthetic Sexuality. A Literary History of Sadomasochism. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Coldness and Cruelty.” In Masochism. Translated by Jean McNeil. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1991.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 3: The Care of the Self. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
Foucault, Michel. “Power and Sex.” In: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Freud, Sigmund. Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. Edited by Philip Reiff. New York: Touchstone, 1997.
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 2018.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and taboo. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Lacan, Jacques. Ècrits. Translated by Bruce Fink in collaborations with Héloïse Fink and Russel Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006.
Lacan, Jacques. On feminine sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge. Book XX. Encore 1972–1973. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated with notes by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.
Morley, Loraine. “THE LOVE AFFAIR(S) OF ANN QUIN.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS). 5:2 (1999): 127–141.
Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
Penney, James. The World of Perversion. Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.
Powell, Josh. “Ann Quin, object relations, and the (in)attentive reader.” Textual Practice. 35:2 (2021): 247–263.
Stevick, Philip. “Voices in the Head: Style and Consciousness in the Fiction of Ann Quin.” In: Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Edited by Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. 231–239.
Sweeney, Carole. “Ann Quin: Forms Forming Themselves.” In: Vagabond Fictions: Gender and Experiment in British Women's Writing, 1945-1970. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 205-245.
White, Hilary. “‘Turning her Over in the Flat of my Dreams’: Visuality, Cut-up and Irreality in the Work of Ann Quin.” Women: a cultural review. 33:1 (2022): 114–130.
Williams, Nonia. “Ann Quin: ‘infuriating’ Experiments?” In: Mitchell, Kaye, Williams, Nonia. British Avant-garde Fiction of the 1960s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 143–159.