ABSTRACT
While literary and cultural studies in the 1980s explored the potential of poststructuralist terminology in an effort at describing how the subject-grafted onto a complex network of significatory difference, deferral and displacement-came to embody and perform gender constructions, concepts such as emplacement, ensoulment, coherence, closure, ethics and moral commitment seem to be emerging as the compelling concern of the 1990s. In an essay called ‘Identity and the Writer’ A.S.Byatt notes:
Lately-and I think this is a cultural observation-I’ve replaced the postromantic metaphor with one of a knot. I see individuals now as knots, in say, the piece of lace that one of Vermeer’s lacemakers is making. Things go through us-the genetic code, the history of the nation, the language or languages we speak…the constraints that are put upon us, the people who are around us. And if we are an individual, it’s because these threads are knotted together in this particular time and this particular place, and they hold. I also have no metaphysical sense of the self, and I see this knot as vulnerable: you could cut one or two threads of it…or you can, of course, get an unwieldy knot where somebody has had so much put in that the knot becomes a large and curious, and ugly object. We are connected, and we also are a connection which is a separate and unrepeated object.
