Speech from the margin : Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttond and Agáta Gordon's Kecskerúzs

Zsadányi, Edit (2001) Speech from the margin : Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttond and Agáta Gordon's Kecskerúzs. Hungarian Studies, 15 (1). pp. 127-142. ISSN 0236-6568

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Abstract

The various feminist projects converge on the idea that language (constructed in its largest sense, as the varied system of discourses through which the world becomes constructed) is the primary cultural agency through which the masculine dominates and represses the feminine. To effect a change at all, it is necessary to undermine language from within, or to mark the ways in which language reveals its own undermining. In much feminist thought, language is understood as a wholly phallogocentric and monolithic domain, which has no place for the ihwomanli who becomes in her difference and otherness the figure for all that remains repressed and silenced. I am analyzing two works by women writers that foreground the issues of marginality and textuality. They belong to different literary traditions: Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons to the American modernist, and Agáta Gordon's Kecskerúzs to the contemporary Hungarian literary context. The reason I read them together is that they both address the problem of identity as it is constructed by discourse. Also, they are exemplary works of an experimentalist feminine lit- erary discourse that has a long tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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