Mouth to mouth: Storytelling and desire in contemporary fairy-tale fiction and film.

摘要

This dissertation contributes to scholarship on contemporary fairy-tale fiction and film by looking at the figures of the storyteller and listener and the act of storytelling itself in a range of texts produced or translated into English within the last thirty years. My focus texts include the television mini-series Arabian Nights (1999); the feature length film Pan's Labyrinth (2006); the collection Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins by Emma Donoghue (1997); and the embedded cycle of stories "The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses" in Jeanette Winterson's novel Sexing the Cherry (1989).;All of these texts thematize the act of narration in a variety of ways and to various ends. I consider how the relationship of narrator and listener is played out in relation to gendered and sexual subjectivity and the desires that the tales inscribe. I ask how each of these texts engages with normative and queer desires, and how these desires are represented and narratively produced through an exploration of the textual dynamics of metanarrational comment, narrative framing, and narrative authority.;In the first half of the dissertation I examine the dynamics of narrative authority in two cinematic engagements with the fairy tale. These chapters take the cinematic narrator into account as a prime mover in directing the ways narrative authority flows. I contend that in both cases narrative authority is related to gender and political and familial hierarchies. The second half of my dissertation explores narrative and sexual desire from a perspective that allows for a broader understanding of how hetero-normative and non-normative subjects are textually produced both thematically and formally. I demonstrate a reading practice that seeks "queer possibility" and emphasizes flexibility and epistemological constructs rather than the ontological status of a text as either inherently queer or straight.