Abstract

This analysis shows the common critique of representation suggested by the fluid metaphor in feminist theory and literature. The poetics of theory and the poetics of literature thus flow together into a metaphorical poetics of the fluid as a utopian form and space that subverts patriarchal language and textually undermines artificial divisions among the very genres of theory and literature that describe it.Ingeborg Bachmann’s fragmentary novel Der Fall Franza reconstructs the crisis and death of its eponymous young Austrian female protagonist, who has been psychologically destroyed by her psychologist husband and who convinces her geologist brother to take her on a research trip to Egypt. One of the first events..