Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and the Sublime Resistance to Totality

Caryl Churchill‟s Top Girls demonstrates the very unadventurous female‟s transformation into a superwoman, a dominant and powerful heroine who struggles against conventional patriarchal and suppressive system. Churchill‟s heroines are highly successful women who achieve it at the expense of destroying their natural femininity are ultimately faced by the atrocious reality of their children‟s ruined fate. On the other hand, Jean-François Lyotard‟s formulation of the sublime is presenting the existence of something unpresentable”. He believes that the sublime happens as a result of privation and its consequent terrors; the sublime feeling is created when terror mingles with pleasure. The present study explicates this conversion in terms of Romantic sublime that is defined as a resistance and transcendence beyond natural boundaries by experiencing pain and pleasure, simultaneously. By recourse to Lyotardian concept of sublime, such feminine definition of society as the representative of wright wing feminism is refuted to be the proper utopian version of any society for women

Keywords:

Grand Narrative , Little Narrative , Lyotardian Sublime , Romantic sublime , Transcendental Illusion