This study departs from the widespread interpretations of Mark Ravenhill’s play Shopping and Fucking in terms of the commodification of the self in the consumerist world and proposes instead to explore the self through an engagement with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ontology. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concepts “body without organs” and “desiring machines” are employed in order to reveal Ravenhill’s concern with the body and its relation to identity in a world where everything is commodified. This study seeks to address the question of shifting of boundaries of ethics, which arises with radical postmodern sensibilities. It tries to reveal the ways in which Ravenhill redefines the established codes, proposing instead an ‘individual’ self, which emerges as a radical and intensive body from an assemblage of forces, flows and different intensities, capable of creating new configurations and codes of ethics, which are adjusted through continuous flux of transformation and becoming.
Tatiana Golban & Sibel Kılınç
Authors
Tatiana Golban is licensed in Philology and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature. She is currently an Associate Professor teaching English and comparative literature courses at Namik Kemal University of Tekirdag, Turkey. She is the author of 3 books (Rewriting the Hero and the Quest: Myth and Monomyth in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières, The Literature of a Turbulent Age: Seventeenth-Century British Literature, and The Myth of Electra in Ancient and Modern Drama) and some 30 studies on different aspects of world and English literature with special focus on the subject of mythical writings from Antiques to modern times. Her main research interests include literary myth, ancient and contemporary drama, and fiction.
Sibel Kılınç is a lecturer at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University. She holds a Master degree in English Language and Literature. Her research interests include different aspects of the postmodern and contemporary English literature.