Castration Desire: Less Is More in Global Anglophone Literature

This interdisciplinary dissertation joins global Anglophone literature with critical theory of several stripes in order to incrementally build, chapter by chapter, an interpretive scheme called “castration desire.” Where the orthodox psychoanalytic account understands castration negatively—to lose the phallus is to lose everything—this dissertation argues for the capacity of “castration” to serve a less-is-more ethos. A longstanding but hitherto unremarked-upon trend in global Anglophone literature reflects precisely this project of pursuing less egoistic modes of thinking and acting, so as to gesture toward a more other-oriented relationality. In place of masculine egoism, Anglophone writers such as Sri Lankan-Canadian Michael Ondaatje, South African-Australian J.M. Coetzee, Japanese-British Kazuo Ishiguro, Chinese-American David Henry Hwang, and Irish-Canadian Emma Donoghue offer prototypes in their characters for generating the less-is-more ethos of castration desire.

The normative masculine proclivity for pitting an “I” over and against a world of others speeds an inequitable system of servitude to the phallic few who enjoy privileged place atop a global hierarchy. But, as I explain in later chapters, this system meets its breaking point in the era of human-induced climate change, hence the need for a novel thought-model that could lead to a fundamental reassessment of any number of norming social contracts derived from normative masculine individualism, including those underpinning fossil-fuel-extraction. In addition to providing a novel optic through which to read a diversity of text-types, “castration desire” provides analytical tools for responding to the current apocalyptic track over which the globalized logic of normative masculine individualism otherwise operates.