Within and Beyond Postmodernism: Oppositional Remediating Strategies in Jeanette Winterson’s The Power Book

Abstract

Informed by interconnected theoretical approaches, the paper aims to illustrate the ways in which Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook (2000), while drawing on specific postmodern ideological elaborations and writing techniques – among which remediation, in the sense of multiple transcodifications, plays a major role –, simultaneously distances itself from the apolitical dilution of meanings which underlies postmodern conceptualizations and identity models. As far as sexual politics is concerned, the essay demonstrates that the sense of plurality and multiplicity in the novel suggests new creative ways of identity re-invention through conscious self-fashioning.