Alcohol, Denial, Life

A gender perspective in Olivia Laing’s, The Trip to Echo Spring

Abstract

This essay explores the relationships between alcohol, literature, and subjectivity that emerge in The Trip to Echo Spring (2013) by Olivia Lang. From a gender perspective it considers which cultural traces shape representations of alcohol consumption in 20th-century Western literature, within a non-fiction literary piece that is part of the hegemonic corpus of international literature. It is a critique contained within the broader question of how alcohol contributes to Western cultural imagery throughout the 20th century.

Such a search is the result of previous investigations, focused on the socio-cultural history of alcohol in Argentina, and the realization of how influential cultural preconceptions are for researchers in this field.

Based on the abovementioned, an essay reflection is proposed which inquiries about the representations of alcohol present in a specific piece, considering the aesthetic and social aspects of these representations and with the horizon of contributing to the reflection on the cultural conditioning of social meanings on an omnipresent practice such as alcohol consumption.