Reconsidering Mimesis and Realism in Literary Prose of the First World War: the Case of Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone
This article addresses issues of representation and mimesis in literary testimonies of the First World War written from the warzone, using Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone as a case study, and revisits the divide that is typically agreed upon when considering the history of realism in 19th- and earl...
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| Gepubliceerd in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Formaat: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Taal: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2025
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| Online toegang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Samenvatting: | This article addresses issues of representation and mimesis in literary testimonies of the First World War written from the warzone, using Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone as a case study, and revisits the divide that is typically agreed upon when considering the history of realism in 19th- and early 20th-century literature. It first takes a fresh look at Aristotle’s mimesis-muthos pair to disprove the conventional consideration of ‘modernist’ writing as anti-mimetic. Michael Rothberg’s concept of ‘traumatic realism’ is useful to understand how authors navigate the compulsion and challenge of representing their experience. I then demonstrate that in literary testimonies of the First World War, the materiality of the experience is crucial in allowing the authors to develop a synaesthetic phenomenology of the war that relies on their sensory experience. In this regard, these texts anticipate new materialism and current material-realist fiction. This bears particularly rich consequences when we look at women’s writing, as will be evidenced through Mary Borden’s engagement with the ‘entangled’ materiality of the ravaged environment and of the mutilated or dying body in The Forbidden Zone. The very concept of subject is interrogated in Borden’s fragments: this ontological questioning also has repercussions of an ideological and ethical nature. Ultimately, this article aims to demonstrate that current considerations on ‘vibrant matter’, ‘transcorporeality’ and posthumanism are fully relevant to earlier texts engaged with representing the crisis that largely contributed to the emergence of our contemporary world. |
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