Composing the subject “in process”: semiotic slippage and language innovation within the child’s narrative voice in my working novel Composition

This paper will discuss my work-in-progress PhD novel Composition, specifically in relation to the formation of the child’s narrative voice in experimental writing by women. Focusing on Julia Kristeva’s conception of the ‘semiotic’ realm of language, I will analyse elements of poetry, prosody, and formal innovation in my creative work. Through the female child’s playful voice boundaries are questioned and collapsed; the self-referential protagonist interrogates the logic of the ‘symbolic’ order, jumbling words and their associative meanings, reconstructing her own, and ‘composing’ a version of her self as she finds her space, as separate to her (artist) mother, in the world.

My paper will examine how feminist forms of the bildungsroman genre and the metafictive child’s voice can act as subversive tools in contemporary discourse. Contemporary writers such as Eimear McBride, Bernadine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood explore the possibilities of the bildungsroman genre through a hybrid form of poetry and prose, and I will demonstrate how my own work utilises this hybrid form in order to unsettle standard literary conventions and to disrupt the phallogocentric discourse that has misrepresented and oppressed the female voice.