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(2017) Claiming space for Australian women's writing, Dordrecht, Springer.
Possibilities from the peripheries into the urban labyrinth
Helen Garner's Monkey grip
Nycole Prowse
pp. 213-226
This chapter proposes that in the literary sphere the drug trope reframes spatial and temporal regulatory notions of the body. The drug metaphor disrupts temporal linearity through the reconfiguration of "junk time". Likewise, landscapes, cityscapes and a sense of place are re-imagined in fluid, drugged dreamscapes. In this way, drug imagery evokes leakages and slippages across time, space and the body enabling a re-evaluation of corporeal possibilities and potential. The "perverse" portrayal of the subject-body in drug literature is hyperbolised through the drug trope. The extremities of drug use also magnify the examination of difference between bodies based on gender and corresponding (dis)connections with space and time. A textual analysis of the Australian novel, Helen Garner's Monkey Grip (1977) in this chapter provides a literary example.
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Full citation:
Prowse, N. (2017)., Possibilities from the peripheries into the urban labyrinth: Helen Garner's Monkey grip, in D. Das & S. Dasgupta (eds.), Claiming space for Australian women's writing, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 213-226.
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