안젤라 카터의『서커스의 밤』에 나타난 성의 정치학: 낯설게 읽기의 어려움과 즐거움

De-familiarizing the Sexual Politics : A Classroom-Reading of Angela Carter"s Nights at the Circus

  Generally regarded as one of the most important novelists in postwar Britain, Angela Carter has achieved international recognition as an energetic writer whose radical experimental writing contributes to the development of the genre of novel as well as a rigorous cultural critic who seeks to liberate women from all kinds of sociohistorical ideologies―literary, cultural, sexual, economic and philosophical. This paper, based on the experience of reading Carter"s Nights at the Circus in the classroom, aims to acknowledge the innovative and provocative nature of Carter"s writing and to examine the sexual politics in Carter"s novel. The readers in the classroom are invited to explore the site where the boundaries between the real and the fantastic are blurred and to raise a question on their perception of the form of the novel. The readers also note that motifs from fairy tales, gothic novels and picaresque novels are playfully and critically appropriated and defamiliarized in Carter"s novel, which challenges the readers to look askew philosophical and cultural discourses on gender, sexuality, and power. Carter"s novel is discussed in this paper in relation to her interest in the theatre and the circus, the novel"s movement from the reality toward the ever more fantastic, and its critical scrutiny of women"s sexuality in patriarchal society as well as its utopian visions of the new relationships between/among men and women. Carter"s Nights at the Circus invites the readers to interrogate the treacherous terrain of the carnival without losing the immediate power of pleasure that the novel generates.