Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Sozialwissenschaften

A Deleuzian Reading of Wuthering Heights: The Micropolitics of Minorization

Abstract

CM Yang

This paper revisits Wuthering Heights, a great yet controversial nineteenth-century novel, by adopting a Deleuzian perspective/micropolitics of (minor) literature in the sense thatall great literature in a broader sense is minor literature, for it deconstructs and dislocates the long-established tradition and its “language seems foreign, open to mutation, and the vehicle for the creation of identity rather than the expression of identity”. In other words, in this novel, the protagonists’ identities are rather created, not just expressed. Looking further into the underlying transforming forces in this novel, the spectator/reader could perceivea variety of minoritarian “becomings”/mutations in Wuthering Heights, the process of liberating/deterritorializing a work of art, in Deleuzian terms, from the hierarchy or subjugation of a privileged/majoritarianmode of representation.