Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Abjection'
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1
Howsam, Melissa Anne. "Reading Through Abjection." NCSU, 2003. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-11212003-195541/.
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In this thesis, I read through Kristeva?s theory of the abject as a way of interpreting Cristina Garcia?s Dreaming in Cuban (1993) and interrogating common psychoanalytic readings of Christina Rossetti?s Goblin Market (1859) and Bram Stoker?s Dracula (1897). The purpose of each of these readings has been to gauge the usefulness of Kristeva?s theory as a critical tool and to determine what it allows us to achieve as literary critics and, even, as readers. Although Kristeva is clear about her desire to see women liberate themselves from the confining roles ascribed to them by psychoanalytic theory and patriarchal norms, she is not clear about how her theory can be used. Therefore, I apply her theory, specifically that of the abject, to these three fundamentally different texts in order to both investigate its usefulness and to determine what is, if anything, the triumphant result of its application (in terms of feminism).
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Tackitt, Alaina Dyann. "The Abjection of the Pythia." Scholar Commons, 2011. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3375.
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Recent academic research has garnered considerable popular interest on the matter of whether the Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, was high. Current findings aim to prove that vapors emitted from beneath the tripod on which the Pythia prophesied were intoxicating, thereby causing her frenzied state and statements. Contemporary scientists' intense interest in proving that the Pythia was not prophetic evokes the question of why the once widely accepted, now generally rejected, idea that a female body can serve as a vessel for the words of the immortal deity holds such significance for modern science. When this curiosity is considered in light of Julia Kristeva's writings on abjection, numerous possibilities are made available. At its simplest, examining the abjection of the Pythia could explain why the voice of modern science is so interested in the words of these ancient women. At best, to consider an active process of abjection nearly three millennia in the making provides an opportunity to expand understandings and interpretations of both the Pythia and her role in the world, past and present, and the abject and its role in abjection beyond literature and theory.
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Ghita, Cristina. "Pastiche and Abjection in American Psycho." Thesis, Malmö högskola, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), 2014. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-23314.
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Wenk, Christian. "Abjection, madness and xenophobia in gothic fiction." Berlin : wvb, Wiss. Verl, 2008. http://d-nb.info/989569101/04.
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Muller, Lavonne Elorie. "Racism and Abjection in the (Post) Colony." Diss., University of Pretoria, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/2263/77484.
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This study examines Kristeva’s notion of abjection to understand the workings of colonial racism. Given the limitations of her Eurocentric standpoint, reference will also be made to the critiques and engagements with abjection by various other scholars. Abjection, when appropriately rethought, could prove to be a beneficial tool to diagnose the interior problems of racism within the historical context of settler-colonialism and apartheid with specific focus on racism within the contemporary South African context.
Reference will also be made to the film, Get Out, to illustrate the persistence of the historically informed system of abject racism and to place emphasize the deficiencies of narrow interpretations of racism which overlook the broader domain of the psycho-social and institutionalised practices of racial abjection. I will elaborate on the proposed critical investigation by drawing parallels between film, specifically the 2017 horror film Get Out, and legislation, Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill. In this sense, Get Out, will be considered as a narrative which questions South Africa’s contemporaneity as a (post)colonial and (post)apartheid state and the limits of the law by comparing and contrasting the film to, the recently approved, Prevention and combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill. I intend to argue that the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill operates on a narrow level and that it is incapable of responding to structural racism as it fails to recognise the psycho-social dimension of racism and that abject racism continues into the (post)colonial context.Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2020.
Jurisprudence
LLM
Unrestricted
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Crous, Matthys Lourens. "Abjection in the novels of Marlene Van Niekerk." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/10311.
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Includes bibliographical references.In this thesis, three of Marlene van Niekerk's novels, translated from Afrikaans into English, are examined, with the focus on the representation of abjection in the texts under discussion.The theoretical point of departure of this study is Julia Kristeva's essay Powers of horror (1982), which addresses, in particular, the notion of abjection and how certain abject elements play a pivotal role in people's everyday lives. From a psychoanalytic perspective, abjection is viewed as a revolt against the mother and foregrounds particularly the influence of the maternal body over the subject. In this instance, the subject desires liberation from the hold of the maternal and seeks to subject the mother to abjection. Bodily fluids seeping out of the body, diseases, viruses, dirt and death (and in particular the corpse) are all elements that are encompassed in the concept of abjection. Manifestations of abjection in the form of the abject mother, abject spaces, abject bodies and the link between abjection and filth are comparatively analysed in the three texts. The thesis concludes by showing that Van Niekerk deliberately inscribes elements of the abject into her texts so as to transgress and deconstruct the norms associated with a patriarchal and racist society in South Africa. Van Niekerk also undermines the norms that underpin such a society: religious indoctrination, gender oppression and Othering. By writing her novel Triomf (1999) in a demotic register, Van Niekerk furthermore questions the prevalent assumptions about what is deemed proper language for writing a novel. Writing, for her, thus serves the purposes of abjecting, of rejecting the impositions of the symbolic order. Following the publication of her first collection of short stories, Die Vrou wat haar verkyker vergeet het [The woman who forgot her binoculars] in 1992, there was general consensus that the baroque nature of the language resulted in reader resistance to the text. This explains why she decided to write her first novel in the crude and obscene language of a low-class family, the Benades of Triomf.
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Porter, Whitney B. "John Waters: Camp, Abjection and the Grotesque Body." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1292345547.
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Whale, Marcus Geoffrey Kwang Chai. "Possession: Feedback, Abjection and the Loss of Control." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2021. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/27345.
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"Possession" is a work of electronic opera for one performer that enacts a
spirit possession through the use of acoustic feedback, an indeterminate
sonic force that moves the performer. This thesis constitutes video
documentation of this opera and a written dissertation. The project focuses
on how giving up control in performing with feedback opens up possibilities
of sounding, moving and being that are otherwise inaccessible. The
dissertation's first chapter outlines the historical use of malfunction in
sound-based artforms, making an argument that many of these uses
domesticate the sonic results of these encounters with malfunction. The
second and third chapters characterise this loss of control as an embrace of
failure, rejecting the known and predetermined lines of heterosexuality in
pursuit of unknowable future possibility. A final chapter uses semiotician Julia
Kristeva's account of "abjection" to describe the breakdown of boundaries in
the body in horror film aesthetics, drawing parallels with the way feedback is
used to embody spirit possession in the opera.
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Chan, Wai-chung, and 陳慧聰. "The discourse of the body, abjection, melancholia and carnival." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2000. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31952562.
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Zhang, Jiachen. "Representations of food and abjection in Asian American fictions." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2018. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/22722/.
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This thesis explores how Asian American literature constructs and negotiates Asian American cultural identities through a series of encounters with food tropes. By looking into images of food preparation, serving and consumption in Asian American fictions, I investigate the ways in which Asian American subjects respond to US racial views of Asian American ethnicity in relation to body, gender, sex and class. In particular, as it considers the ways in which these fictions handle dominant US culture, the thesis focuses on their response to this culture's longstanding tendency to regard Asian culinary habits and conventions as exotic and disgusting. I argue that Julia Kristeva's theorization of the abject illuminates the complex ways in which Asian American literary culture negotiates US hegemonic representations of Asian culinary tradition. I suggest that the abjection of Asian foods, bodies and subjectivities works against the received modes of racial othering in US culture, allowing new identity formations to emerge. The Asian foods and immigrants that are deemed exotic and loathsome come to provide a discursive space through which Asian American writers can begin to unsettle the boundaries that maintain US white supremacy. The thesis looks into how the literary representations of food tropes by Amy Tan, Gish Jen, Ruth Ozeki, Monique Truong and David Wong Louie reinvigorate and challenge the varied exoticization and repulsion of Asian foods and subjectivities. Through intersectional readings of the alimentary scenes, and avoiding causational links between food and identity, I examine how these fictions delineate a metaphorical and metonymic process of incorporating and disavowing Asian American characters by interlinking food with a set of critical terrains such as gender, class, sex, colonialism, domesticity and nationhood. But these texts also share a central determination to interrogate how the abjection of Asian American food and subjectivities provides Asian American characters with suggestive material through which they seek to displace stable racial categories and challenge dominant reductive clichés about ethnic food. In this body of fictional work, the diverse presentations of the subjects' strategies of resistance and subversion further draw attention to the complicated workings of a set of Asian American cultural politics, including inter-generational reconciliation, feminist alliance, transnational feminism, queer diaspora, culinary authenticity and collective cultural memory.
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Chan, Wai-chung. "The discourse of the body, abjection, melancholia and carnival." Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 2000. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B22199676.
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McCabe-Remmell, Patricia A. "Joyce...Beckett...Dedalus...Molloy : a study in abjection and masochism." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2006. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0001585.
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Watlington, Emily. "Pretty gross : aestheticized abjection in feminist video art, 1996-2009." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/118496.
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Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2018.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 124-135).
This thesis examines the work of three video artists -- Pipilotti Rist, Marilyn Minter, and Mika Rottenberg -- who all make work that is simultaneously mesmerizing and repulsive. While Immanuel Kant has argued that beauty and disgust are opposed, these works complicate this binary, as does my choice of the more minor terms "pretty" and "gross." My weaker descriptors encapsulate the desensitization to seductive and disgusting imagery that, in the media-saturated context of the late 90s/early 2000s, is the result of their pervasiveness and thus banality. These artists respond to abject feminist performance art of the 1960s and 70s, which some critics at the time worried attracted the male gaze while setting out to avert it. Theorists of disgust, however, have long understood seduction as always already part of disgust, which the artists in "Pretty Gross" set out to tool strategically. They respond to representations of women as objects of fascination on screen by borrowing resources and formal devices from mass media created to seduce viewers and consumers, but train their lenses instead on traditionally disgusting imagery, from menstrual blood to saliva-coated caviar. Rendering the disgusting palatable, these artists have attracted massive popular audiences and revenue. Yet all have raised a number of ethical quandaries for their critics, who struggle to defend their attempts to reclaim representations of women's bodies from an abusive history. The widespread visibility and influence of their work makes this critical interrogation especially urgent. Ultimately, I argue that Rist, Minter, and Rottenberg reflect, rather than resolve, tensions between ethics and aesthetics, gender and image, as well as attraction and aversion.
by Emily Watlington.
S.M.
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Steyn, Christine. "After birth : abjection and maternal subjectivity in Svea Josephy's "Confinement"." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/85724.
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Thesis (MA)-- Stellenbosch University, 2013.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this thesis I investigate the radical reframing of maternal representation in the photographic series by Cape Town-based artist Svea Josephy (b. 1969), entitled Confinement 2005-ongoing. Using Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of the maternal body’s relation to abjection, as well as its imperative to the remodelling of the relationship between the corporeal and the cultural, I explore how Josephy’s images explicitly engage with the Kristevan abject in order to disrupt cultural inscriptions of maternity and ‘motherhood’. I contend that Confinement situates Josephy’s experience of ‘becoming-mother’ against the dominant discourses of maternity and birth, and thereby uses the maternal subject as a means to interrogate broader issues of gender and identity.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In hierdie tesis ondersoek ek die radikale herberaming van die moederfiguur in Confinement (2005 tot op hede) – ‘n fotoreeks van die Kaapse kunstenaar Svea Josephy (geb. 1969). Julia Kristeva se teorieë oor die moederlike liggaam, en in besonder die moederliggaam se verhouding tot abjeksie, word aangewend om die verband tussen die liggaamlike en die kulturele te herbedink. Ek ondersoek hoe hierdie fotoreeks Kristeva se konsep van die abjekte benut, ten einde kulturele voorskriftelikheid oor moederskap en 'ma-wees' te ontwrig. Ek argumenteer dat Confinement Josephy se ondervinding van 'wordend-moederskap’ die dominante diskoerse van moederskap en geboorte uitdaag, en sodoende die moederlike subjek gebruik om breër aspekte rondom geslag en identiteit te bevraagteken.
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Sloss, Eric J. "Homeless Abjection and the Uncanny “Place” of the National Imagination." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2014. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500028/.
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This project examines the effects of the homeless body and the threat of homelessness on constructing a national imaginary that relies on the trope of locatability for recognition as a citizen-subject. The thesis argues that homelessness, the oft-figured specter of public space, functions as bodies that are “pushed out” as citizen-subjects due to their inability maintain both discursive and material location. I argue that figures of “home” rely on the ever-present threat of dislocation to maintain a privileged position as the location of the consuming citizen-subject. That is, the presence of the dislocated homeless body haunts the discursive and material construction of home and its inhabitants. Homeless then becomes the uncanny inverse of home, functioning as an abjection that reifies home “place” as an arbiter of recognition in a neoliberal national imaginary. The chapters proceed to examine what some consider homeless “homes,” focusing on the reduction of the homeless condition to a place of inhabitance, or the lack thereof. This attempt to locate the homeless body becomes a symptom of the desire for recognition as a placed body. The thesis ends on a note of political possibility, figuring the uncanny as a rupture that evacuates language of signification and opens up space for a form of recognition without an over-determined identity.
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Chare, Nicholas John. "On nothing : a Kristevan reading of trauma, abjection and representation." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2004. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/1945/.
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This doctorate provides a critical reassessment of Julia Kristeva's work on abjection, focusing on the abject as a form of writing. It brings Kristeva's work on abjection into dialogue with the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Paul Celan and Charlotte Delbo, the music of Diamanda Galas, the paintings of Francis Bacon, and a series of photographs taken by the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. The overarching argument of the thesis is that these different mediums access the realm of the abject in distinct and effective ways. Centrally, I argue that Celine writes `towards, ' Celan from `within' and Delbo `back from' this realm. I begin the thesis with a consideration of the ethical ramifications accompanying Kristeva's decision to use the works of Celine as the primary exemplar of writing as a process of abjection. The chapter includes an engagement with Celine's anti-Semitic pamphlets. It also compares the work of Celine and Jean-Paul Sartre in terms of the sexual economy of their writing. In my second chapter, I argue for understanding the abject as a kind of noise that exists as the underside to language. I track the way noise manifests itself in language through detailed readings of works by Bacon, Galas and Celan. The third chapter explores Delbo's conception of anamnesis, drawing particularly on the works of Didier Anzieu and Brian Massumi to think through the notion of the `skin of memory'. I make a case for understanding Delbo's prose as a conduit for sensation as well as a mode of description. In my conclusion I consider the status of four photographs taken by a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz as a form of bearing witness to atrocity. I argue that these images can be understood as a visual correlative to the writings of Celan and Delbo.
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Wittmeier, Carmen. "A half-closed book, abjection in John Berryman's the dream songs." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp01/MQ40019.pdf.
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Wing, Jennifer Mary. "Resisting the Vortex: Abjection in the Early Works of Herman Melville." unrestricted, 2008. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04192008-191516/.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2008.Title from file title page. Robert Sattelmeyer, committee chair; Janet Gabler-Hover, Calvin Thomas, committee members. Electronic text (215 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed June 10, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-215).
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Vicks, Meghan Christine. "The postmodern ORANUS: Carnival and abjection in Victor Pelevin's "Homo Zapiens"." Connect to online resource, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:1448682.
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Hunt, Anna Louise. "Abjection & aesthetics : bodies, space & subjectivity in contemporary women's writing." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.437471.
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Compton, Alice. "Waste of a nation : photography, abjection and crisis in Thatcher's Britain." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2016. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/65974/.
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This examination of photography in Thatcher's Britain explores the abject photographic responses to the discursive construction of ‘sick Britain' promoted by the Conservative Party during the years of crisis from the late 1970s onwards. Through close visual analyses of photojournalist, press, and social documentary photographs, this Ph.D. examines the visual responses to the Government's advocation of a ‘healthy' society and its programme of social and economic ‘waste-saving'. Drawing Imogen Tyler's interpretation of ‘social abjection' (the discursive mediation of subjects through exclusionary modes of ‘revolting aesthetics') into the visual field, this Ph.D explores photography's implication in bolstering the abject and exclusionary discourses of the era. Exploring the contexts in which photographs were created, utilised and disseminated to visually convey ‘waste' as an expression of social abjection, this Ph.D exposes how the Right's successful establishment of a neoliberal political economy was supported by an accelerated use and deployment of revolting photographic aesthetics. My substantial contribution to knowledge is in tracking the crises of Thatcher's Britain through reference to an ‘abject structure of feeling' in British photography by highlighting a photographic counter-narrative that emerged in response to the prevailing discourse of social sickness. By analysing the development and reframing the photographic languages of British documentary photographers such as Chris Killip, Tish Murtha, Martin Parr and Nick Waplington, I demonstrate how such photography was explicitly engaged in affirmative forms of social abjection and ‘grotesque realism'. This Ph.D examines how this renewed form of documentary embodied an insurgent photographic visual language which served to undercut the encompassing discourses of exclusionary social abjection so pervasive at the time.
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Svetich, Kella de Castro. "Flesh and blood : colonial trauma and abjection in contemporary Filipino American fiction /." For electronic version search Digital dissertations database. Restricted to UC campuses. Access is free to UC campus dissertations, 2005. http://uclibs.org/PID/11984.
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Widén, Carl. "A Monumental Transgression : Incest, Abjection and the Unrepresentable in Paul Auster's Invisible." Thesis, Högskolan i Halmstad, Sektionen för humaniora (HUM), 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-15814.
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This essay offers an analysis of Paul Auster's novel Invisible. The main focus of the essay is on the incestuous love affair between Adam Walker and his sister Gwyn. It is argued that the novel via this incestuous affair is addressing the issue of the unrepresentable, what Lacan termed the “real” that lies beyond the symbolic order. It is shown that the concept of the unrepresentable has been a central theme in Auster's work throughout his career. The main theoretical foundation of the essay is Julia Kristeva's theories regarding the “abject.” A summary of Kristeva's theories is therefore offered, as well as a summary of research into the incest taboo.
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Ross, Dusty K. "Readings of Zwelethu Mthethwa's South African Photographs: Postcolonialsim, Abjection, and Cultural Studies." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2012. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/140.
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South African painter turned photographer, Zwelethu Mthethwa, was born in Durban during Apartheid. In 1980 Mthethwa began taking his photographs in the shanty towns on the outskirts of Cape Town and later took pictures in Mozambique and New Orleans. His work has global significance. Using art and literary theory and criticism, I expand upon the significance of his photographs in the contemporary world. I do “readings” of eight photographs from eight different series of Zwelethu Mthethwa’s work using postcolonial theory, abjection, and cultural studies as theoretical constructs to provide three different angles for interpreting his work.
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Trench, R. "Towards abjection: the loss of selfhood in the plays of Marina Carr." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.487464.
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Towards Abjection: The Loss ofSelfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr • This dissertation examines the condition and nature of repressed subjectivities in Marina Carr's plays, from 1988-2002. The plays explore painful processes of identity through the lens of Carr's initial absurdist style to the more naturalistic Irish theatrical style, which typically concerns the familiar issues of oppression, repression and rural Ireland. For Carr, the processes of identity are ingrained in the past, but the impact of these processes is always present and significantly powerful in her plays. This dissertation examines the ways in which loss of selfhood and repressed identities are embedded in Carr's works, and how this links to Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection. The abject self and its development can be traced from play to Play. Aspects of identity in the works, whether that of Traveller woman, corrupt politician, traitor or displaced mother figure present the subject as occupying a position of marginality, experiencing the analogous culpability and exclusion. Her characters depict the confluence of contradictory forces, seeking to belong and yet bereft of a spiritual and emotional belonging that may enable them to do so. While this dissertation explores the power ofthe past in terms of the present in Carr's plays, it necessarily refers to and contextualises cultural and historical references. The plays reveal characters' individual estrangement and its effect on their relationship with others in the world around. Kristeva's theory applied to Carr's plays problematise individual states of abjection beyond the subject's encounters with borders within oneself to include borders in society. Recognising this reasserts the possibility of confronting and coming to terms with abjection as a whole, meaning that confronting individual problems is relevant to the transformation of society in general.
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Holland, Daniel L. "Abjection, Telesthesia, and Transnationalism: Incest in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy." Scholar Commons, 2015. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5492.
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Many consider Oldboy be the defining film of the most recent wave of South Korean cinema, with scholars such as Terrence McSweeney and Kim Kyun Hyun arguing the film's representation of South Korean culture through collective memory, trauma, and Westernization. However, most of the current scholarship that surrounds the film does not adequately address the film's prominent theme of incest. My thesis explores the anxious implications of the film's incestuous imagery and reads it as a figure for the film's transnational presence. Specifically, in my project, incest is the nucleus on which I build each argument outward. First through abjection and desire for self and other, onto telesthesia and desire for private and public, then finally, transnationalism and the desire for national and global. These desires we typically take as binaries, but in fact, we experience an anxiety of being simultaneously on both sides of the binary. I argue that attentiveness Oldboy`s representation of the incest taboo brings necessary nuances to the current scholarship that surrounds it: Contemporary South Korean culture cannot be a primary focus, as South Korea has always been entangled within an "other", be it through Colonization, Westernization, or more recently telecommunications. In conclusion, by closely examining the incest taboo in Oldboy, this project sheds light on the simultaneity within the desires of self and other, private and public, and finally, national and global.
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Bishop, Kyle William. "Dead Man Still Walking: A Critical Investigation into the Rise and Fall . . . and Rise of Zombie Cinema." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/194727.
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Horror films act as a barometer for society's tensions and anxieties, and the early years of the twenty-first century have seen a notable increase in such movies, the zombie narrative in particular. This "Zombie Renaissance" demonstrates increased dread concerning violent death--via terrorist attacks or contagious infection--and establishes the currency of a critical investigation into this oft-maligned subgenre. The zombie narrative has particular value to American cultural studies as the creature was born on the shores of the New World, rather than being co-opted from the Old, and it functions as a symbolic reminder of the atrocities of colonialism and slavery. Drawing on ethnographic studies of Haitian folklore, the voodoo-based zombie films of the 1930s and '40s do crucial cultural work in their own right, revealing deep-seated racist attitudes and imperialist paranoia, but the zombie invasion narrative established by George A. Romero has even greater singularity. Having no established literary analogue, Romero borrowed instead from voodoo mythology, vampire tales, and science fiction invasion narratives to develop a new tradition with Night of the Living Dead in 1968. His conception of a contagious, cannibalistic zombie horde uniquely manifests modern apprehensions about the horrors of Vietnam, the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, and, in the more recent films, the problems of excessive consumerism and the anxieties of both the Cold War and the current War on Terror. Essentially, zombies work as powerful metaphors for modern-day society and the prevailing cultural unease surrounding violent death and the loss of autonomous subjectivity, and, as recent production proves, the subgenre will continue to serve the viewing public as it grows, mutates, and evolves.
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Lee, Sung-Ae. "Utopias, dystopias, and abjection pathways for society's others in George Eliot's major fictions /." Phd thesis, Australia : Macquarie University, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/45363.
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Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of English, 2003.Bibliography: p. 250-270.
Introduction -- Female subjectivity, abjection, and agency in Scenes of clerical life -- A questionable Utopia: Adam Bede -- Dystopia and the frustration of agency in the double Bildungsroman of The mill on the floss -- Abjection and exile in Silas Marner -- Justice and feminist Utopia in Romola -- Radicalism as Utopianism in Felix Holt, the radical -- The pursuit of what is good: Utopian impulses in Middlemarch -- Nationalism and multiculturalism: shaping the future as transformative Utopia in Daniel Deronda.
Within a framework based on Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, this thesis investigates how Utopian impulses are manifested in George Eliot's novels. Eliot's utopianism is presented first by a critique of dystopian elements in society and later by placing such elements in a dialogic relationship with utopian ideas articulated by leading characters. Each novel includes characters who are abjected because they have different ideas from the social norms, and such characters are silenced and expelled because society evaluates these differences in terms of its gender, class and racial prejudices. Dystopia is thus constituted as a resolution of the conflict between individual and society by the imposition of monologic values. Dialogic possibilities are explored by patterned character configurations and by the cultivation of ironical narrators' voices which enfold character focalization within strategic deployment of free indirect discourse. -- Eliot's early works, from Scenes of Clerical Life to Silas Marner, focus their dystopian elements as a critique of a monologic British society intolerant of multiple consciousnesses, and which consigns "other" voices to abjection and thereby precludes social progress by rejecting these "other" voices. In her later novels, from Romola to Daniel Deronda, Eliot presents concrete model utopian societies that foreshadow progressive changes to the depicted, existing society. Such an imagined society incorporates different consciousnesses and hence admits abject characters, who otherwise would have been regarded as merely transgressive, and thus silenced or eliminated. Abjected characters in Eliot's fiction tend also to be utopists, and hence have potential for positively transforming the world. Where they are depicted as gaining agency, they also in actuality or by implication bring about change in society, the nation and the wider world. -- An underlying assumption is that history can be changed for the better, so that utopian ideals can be actualized by means of human agency rather than by attributing teleological processes to supernatural forces. When a protagonist's utopian impulses fail, it is both because of dystopian elements of society and because of individual human weaknesses. In arguably her most utopian works, Romola and Daniel Deronda, Eliot creates ideal protagonists, one of whom remains in the domestic sphere because of gender, and another who is (albeit voluntarily) removed from British society because of his race/class. However, Romola can be seen as envisaging a basis for female advancement to public life, while Daniel Deronda suggests a new world order through a nationalism grounded in multiculturalism and a global utopianism.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
v, 270 p
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Jones, Adam Daniel. "Between self and other : abjection and unheimlichkeit in the films of David Lynch." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/1230.
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This thesis re-evaluates David Lynch’s films and their critical reception, with particular reference to psychological models employed in the context of ‘Lynchian’ themes such as identity, the self, the material, doubling and ambiguity, In repositioning readings and arguing for a new approach, I identify the flaws in the critical reception and , proceeding form the contention that the reception of the films suggests complex and specific psychological responses, explore possible origins with reference to two principal and associated theories. The five films selected as subjects are Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. The uncanny, or more specifically Unheimlichkeit (as described by Jensch, Rank, Freud et al) is encapsulated as ‘something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light’ and encompasses a cluster of associations, e.g. doubles and doppelgangers, repression, ambiguous humanity, madness, amputation, the womb and the domestic. Distinct but closely related, the abject (as described by Kristeva), describes visual and physical elements associated with the uncanny but is often less nuanced and more extreme, engendering revulsion, loathing and ultimately a jouissance epitomised by the act of self effacement or the destruction of the self that often concludes an inevitable, heightening and terminal process of uncanniness. I argue that the symbiotic relationship between the uncanny and abject (the concepts coexist and each is implicated in the action of the other) pervades Lynch’s films and test the hypothesis that the balance between them shifts throughout the course of his career, identifying a trajectory characterised by an early predominance of visually disturbing objects through to a more pronounced and complex preoccupation with the uncanny in the late films. I will relate this exploration of the relationship between the uncanny and abject to questions of reception, examining how it problematises readings.
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Perham, John. "SCIENCEFRICTION: OF THE POSTHUMAN SUBJECT, ABJECTION, AND THE BREACH IN MIND/BODY DUALISM." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2016. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/268.
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This thesis investigates the multiple readings that arise when the division between the biological and technological is interrupted--here abjection is key because the
binary between abjection and gadgetry gives multiple meanings to other binaries, including male/female. Using David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and eXistenZ, I argue that multiple readings arise because of people’s participation with electronically mediated technology. Indeed, abjection is salient because Cronenberg’s films present an ambivalent relationship between people and technology; this relationship is often an uneasy one because technology changes people on both a somatic and cognitive level.
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Keung, Olivia. "Subterranean Inscriptions." Thesis, University of Waterloo, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10012/2878.
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This thesis considers the condition of homelessness through its marginal position against society. Exteriority is often perceived as an abnormal state to be resolved through assimilation. To investigate it in its relationship with the inside, as opposites in a field of interaction, implies a constant state of reaction and change, instead of one that rests in a resolution. The thesis takes this form of continuous shifting between perspectives, media, scale of interaction, and locations, both physical and psychological. Its journey constitutes a search for a middle ground between absolute power and absolute freedom, interiority and exteriority, and an exploration into the possibilities for interaction in this strange and uncertain place. Through this strategy, the thesis removes the issue of homelessness from the conventional framework of an economical problem, to understand it instead as an existential reality. Homelessness becomes an experience that involves real people and unseen identities; the shifts in the form of this work reflect the subtle idiosyncracies that arise from this subjective reading. In its exteriority, homelessness is related to the psychoanalytical notion of otherness: a quality that is emotional and uncontrolled, and exists outside of social laws. As a threat to public order, this quality is undesireable within society. Thus, the Other is an identity that becomes subjugated and hidden through the exercize of power. The thesis relies on established ideas, including Michel Foucault's exposure of this social repression, R. D. Laing's empathetic perception of ontological insecurity, and Julia Kristeva's essay on abjection, to give context to its ambiguous subject. Set against the tentative narration and notation of lived experiences, they seek to uncover the subjective identity of the Other, and to grasp the significance of his expulsion from the interior. The intention of this work is not to judge, or to implement solutions. Rather, it is passive and receptive, and exists largely in the mere confrontation of this estranged condition.
Out of this confrontation, the voices that were buried begin to emerge and assert themselves. Narrative, criticism, design, and visual essay become the vehicles that convey these voices and the multiplicity of their existential experiences, forming a reality from that which was previously invisible to the objective city. This mapping is a construction of displaced identities. The synthesis of these elements exposes the grounds for the possibility of new connections between individuals.
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Alexandrescu, Liviu Gabriel. "Legally high, officially lost: injecting NPS use and drug abjection in Post-Communist Romania." Thesis, Lancaster University, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.716377.
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Since the late 2000s the distribution of what seemed to be unregulated ‘recreational’ drugs by street and online retailers has prompted media hype and public anxiety in Europe and elsewhere. These ‘legal highs’ or ‘new psychoactive substances’ (NPS) were often associated with health risks and antisocial behaviour, and they eventually inspired policy debates along with new scheduling measures. This project explores NPS’ general reception in Romania and their more specific integration into injecting drug users' repertoires, a segment of the local drug market traditionally dominated by heroin. By drawing on mainstream media texts and field data collected around treatment facilities such as a methadone maintenance clinic, it focuses on the troubling moral identities of intravenous substance users and the disciplinary practices of the medico-legal apparatus meant to monitor them. In setting out a moral panic model re-imagined as bouts of collective disgust or social abjection, it seeks to connect lived experiences and moral understandings of emerging drugs with historical layers of prohibition discourses that stratify drug using bodies into abject identities. NPS are thus revealed to shape two types of moral panic as drug abjection in post-communist Romania. The first emerges from media discourse and concerns the clean or valuable youth of the nation, calling for the containment of the new drugs trade to assure the sanitisation and survival of the social body. The second surfaces among injecting drug users, with ‘legalists’ or NPS users being increasingly seen by both drug workers and opiate users as a source of disruption to the regulatory devices and collaborative goals of rehabilitation. This ultimately raises larger questions about the liberal governance of pleasure and consumption in Romania’s transition to market democracy. The fluidity o f ‘NPS’ as a medical and policy object thus seems to indicate the ontological spilling of the rational choice-making self out of the flows of capital, power and historical time
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Hanley, Mary Pat. "A breakdown in boundaries as explored through abjection and the language of abstract art /." Connect to this title online, 2007. http://etd.lib.clemson.edu/documents/1202500798/.
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Farrar, Patricia Doreen. "Relinquishment and abjection : a semanalysis of the meaning of losing a baby to adoption /." Electronic version, 1999. http://adt.lib.uts.edu.au/public/adt-NTSM20030707.110837/index.html.
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Younger, Jim. "Fair game for the whole hog : celebrating abjection and puerility in a comic novel." Thesis, University of Hull, 2011. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:6904.
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Ramirez, Ricardo R. "Your Abjection is in Another Castle: Julia Kristeva, Gamer Theory, and Identities-in-Différance." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2017. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/560.
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Typified rhetorical situations are often a result of normalized ideologies within cultures; however, they also have the capability to produce new ideology. Within these discursive sites, identities are constructed among these normalized social acts. More importantly, these identities are constructed across many layers, not limited to one social act, but many that overlap and influence each other. In this paper, I focus on the identities that are constructed in marginalized spaces within sites of interacting discourse. Focusing on the rhetoric of abjection posited by Julia Kristeva, along with McKenzie Wark’s exploration of gamespace, a liminal theoretical space that encompasses the sites of analysis and ideology formation from the perspective of gamers, I analyze disruptions of normalized social practices in the gaming genre in order to implement the use of abjection as a method of understanding how sites of difference produce meaning for minoritarian subjects.
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Dean, Sigrid Daniel. "The abjection of the self : a new reading of the narrative fiction of Elsa Morante." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.439078.
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Liu, Edgar Yue Lap Faculty of Science UNSW. "Neo-normativity, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and latrinalia: The demonstration of a concept on non-heterosexual performativities." Publisher:University of New South Wales, 2009. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/43377.
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This thesis uses the theory of abjection to understand differentiations in non-heterosexual identity performances in two distinct spaces - the 2005 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (SGLMG) parade and its associated press coverage, and latrinalia (graffiti found inside public toilets). At the same time, this thesis also presents evidence for a new concept of neo-normativity, where the stereotypical is normalised, both internally and externally, and actively reproduced. Neo-normativity, in turn, succeeds in explaining the many abjected relationships that between non-heterosexual communities and the stereotypical and quintessentialised performances. At the 2005 SGLMG parade such quintessentialised (or neo-normalised) performances were treated with both contempt - for being stereotypical and narrowly representative of the very diversity of non-heterosexual communities - as well as a tool for attracting commercial sponsorships which have growingly become an integral part to the continued survival of the annual parade. On a different level, another expression of abject was also revealed when these neo-normalised performances are persistently criticised by academics, news reporting and official photography for being stereotypical and non-representative which in itself are both a recognition as well as an ejection of the non-normative aspects of non-heterosexualities. Such an expression of abject was also evident in latrinalia found in several public toilet facilities throughout Greater Sydney were the interplay of desire and ejection were played out in a more covert manner, all the while highlighting the marginality of non-heterosexualities in these presumably heteronormative spaces. This application of abject theory emphasises neo-normative performances as permanently peripheral, a marginality of which makes these performances (and identities) intrinsically Queer.
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Sharon, Attard. "Banishing the abject : constituting oppositional relationships in a Maltese harbour town." Thesis, Brunel University, 2014. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/13849.
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This thesis explores abjection as it comes to be socially reproduced across generations, and contested in moments of cultural resistance. It does so by examining how children from the rough inner harbour town of Marsa, Malta, responded to the presence of Sub-Saharan African migrants within their social space. The children seemed implicitly aware of how their working class town had historically been constituted as a socially marginal space, dubbed ‘low status’ by virtue of the social transgressions and vices which were considered to occur within it. The subsequent state of being symbolically cast off, or socially marginalized, is considered in terms of ‘abjection’. I explore how some people come to be devalued according to predominant symbolic systems of classification and value, and I examine how these peripheral social positions often come to be reproduced and resisted. The introduction of an open centre for sub-Saharan African migrant men in 2005 saw a sudden shift in the demographic population of Marsa, as hundreds of socially marginalized men were relocated within a dilapidated trade school on the outskirts of the town, whilst others sought to take advantage of cheap rent in the area. This thesis explores how my child informants came to constitute oppositional relationships with the migrants and with the Maltese bourgeoisie in turn, by appropriating concepts of dirt and social pollution as a symbolic boundary. In so doing, children subconsciously resisted the states of abjection conferred upon them, effectively and performatively shifting the abject in another direction whilst constructing a vision of their own alterity. In making this argument, my thesis brings together existing literature on social reproduction and abjection, whilst addressing a lacuna in anthropological literature by considering how politicized processes of abjection are undertaken by those who are socially marginalized themselves. It also marks a significant contribution to child-focused anthropology, in understanding ways in which children engage with processes of abjection.
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Batchelder, Kelly. "SCENE AND UNSEEN: ABJECTION AND THE FEMALE BODY IN FILMS AND DRAMA OF THE NORTHERN IRISH TROUBLES, 1969-1998." OpenSIUC, 2020. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/1810.
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This dissertation focuses on the empowerment and disempowerment of the female body during the Troubles of Northern Ireland (1969-1998). It explores the ways that visual texts – mainly film and theater – expose, explain, and challenge the denigrating perceptions of the female body that prevailed during and after the prison protests of the early 1980s for special category status. In each of my four chapters, I examine a Troubles film or drama via French Feminist Julia Kristeva’s theorization of the female body as an abject threat to patriarchy. This dissertation utilizes the theory of abjection as a way to explain the elision of the female body, manifested as the so-called “dirty” protester, the mother and wife of the hunger striker, and the transgender female, from the pages of history, but with the ultimate goal of challenging the very perception of the female body as inherently abject.
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Jones, D. H. "Abjection and the construction of self in the prose fiction of Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.605681.
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This thesis analyses the construction of identity in the prose fiction of Genet and Beckett via the figure of abjection. Abjection is understood in both a literary and a psychoanalytical sense; Kristeva's theorisation of a poorly-differentiated pre-Oedipal subject is important for reading the ironic reinscription of identity in Genet and Beckett, where the subject's exclusion and humiliation are the grounds for an ironic new selfhood. Chapter 1 examines the role of parental figures in the narrative construction of subjectivity. Kristeva's theorisation of the child's struggle for psychic separation is proposed as a critical framework for reading Genet and Beckett before turning to the specifies of parent-child relationships. I analyse the role of the signature in constructing the self, from its interrogation of filiation and textual unity to the theoretical formulations of which it is the subject in texts by Jacques Derrida which specifically address Beckett and Genet. In chapter 2 I discuss the pseudo-autobiographical pronouncements heralded by the name "Genet" in Genet's fiction, characterised by a self-abasement common to almost all Genet's and Beckett's characters. The ironic gesture of wilful submission constitutes an ironic reassertion of identity which is predicated on the porous instability of the dominant order seen in Bataille and Barthes and illuminated by the common notion of miracle. Genet's and Beckett's "miracles" and religious imagery are not simply parodic, but interrogate the signifying practices which produce value in the first place. Chapter 3 investigates the role of the abject body in the construction of identity. Psychoanalysis theorises ingestion and sexual activity as drives which lead to the institution of social prohibitions; the dual bodily and symbolic function of Freud's totem meal may be related to ingestion and sexuality in Genet and Beckett. The elusive phantasmatic bodies of Ce qui est reste ..., Assez and Comment c'est degrade the expressive capabilities of language yet resist the situation of identity in the body, while Pompes Funebres founds values and identity in the flexing disunity of abjection and the submersion of narrative linearity in the visual.
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Koskentola, Kristiina. "Interconnected in-between : on the dynamics of abjection, animism, temporality and location in nomadic art practice." Thesis, University of the Arts London, 2017. http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/10824/.
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This practice based PhD research is conducted through my installations One Hundred Ten Thousand (2011-12), Rituals to Mutations (2013) and Blackballing (2013). It is a journey from the sites of propagation marginalised villages in the outskirts of Beijing and a forgotten Buddhist temple in Chongqing, Central China - through the production processes to exhibitions in global venues. This research examines the potentiality of nomadism as a political position. This specific agency provides a unique setting through which this inquiry makes a contribution to the field of contemporary art in the contexts of globalisation, nomadic subjectivity, new materialism and the posthuman/postanthropocentric condition, and to visual language. It argues for a more ethical and material relationship with others, human and non-human. I examine how transformative, intersubjective relations, nomadic politics, extensive lived experience, local knowledge and different levels of collaboration might be addressed by my artworks and how these processes might be encountered by the viewer. I explore how the use of these different fluid connections in my work might transform our sense of ourselves and our relationship with others, human or not. As a process of rereading and reconstituting, starting from specific cultural details like those of Chinese village graveyards, and interconnecting spatial, historical, sociopolitical and metaphysical reconfiguration, the research project examines the possibilities of merging them with emergent, unexpected bodies of knowledge and systems of interdependence. Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytical notion of abjection is a frame of reference through which I develop methodological tools. In this research, I situate this psychoanalytical, Eurocentric and rather limited notion in more anthropological and extended fields of relationships, especially in relation to notions such as ‘becoming’ (Gilles Deleuze) and animism (Anselm Franke), and to local knowledge and nomadic discourses (Rosi Braidotti). I do this in order to examine how oppositional relations between the Self and the Other and dualistic concepts might be transformed. I evaluate my research in dialogic relation to other artists’ works, via reflexive conversations alongside theoretical propositions and in relation to my political nomadic position as a researcher and practitioner. This research leads to a re-evaluation of how concepts of abjection and resistance might be rethought in art practice. By integrating processes of abjection with Deleuzian ‘becoming’, my artworks explore how transformative processes of, for example, material(ities), rituals or pollution, might be engendered in systems of relations in which oppositional relations between subjects and objects (human and non-human) are destabilised and operate inclusively.
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Gardner, Barbara J. "Speaking Voices in Postcolonial Indian Novels from Orientalism to Outsourcing." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2012. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/85.
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In Orientalism, Edward Said identified how the Westerner “spoke for” and represented the silent Orient. Today with the burgeoning call-center business with India, it seems that the West now wants the Orient to speak for it. But is the voice that Western business requires in India a truly Indian voice? Or is it a manipulation which is a new form of the silencing of the Indian voice? This dissertation identifies how several Postcolonial Indian writers challenge the silence of Orientalism and the power issues of the West through various “speaking voices” of narratives representative of Indian life. Using Julie Kristeva’s abjection theory as a lens, this dissertation reveals Arundhati Roy as “speaking abjection” in The God of Small Things. Even Roy’s novelistic setting suffers abjection through neocolonialism. Salman Rushdie’s narrative method of magic realism allows “speaking trauma” as his character Saleem in Midnight’s Children suffers the traumas of Partition and Emergency as an allegorical representation of India. Using magic realism Saleem is able to speak the unspeakable. Other Indian voices, Bapsi Sidhwa, Khushwant Singh, and Rohinton Mistry “speak history” as their novels carry the weight of conveying an often-absent official history of Partition and the Emergency, history verified by Partition surviror interviews. In Such a Long Journey, Mistry uses an anthrozoological theme in portraying issues of power over innocence. Recognizing the choices and negotiations of immigrant life through the coining of the word (dis)assimilation, Jhumpa Lahiri’s writings are analyzed in terms of a “speaking voice” of (dis)assimilation for Indian immigrants in the United States, while Zadie Smith’s White Teeth “speaks (dis)assimilation” as a voice of multiple ethnicites negotiating immigrant life in the United Kingdom. Together these various “speaking voices” show the power of Indian writers in challenging the silence of Orientalism through narrative.
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Liebig, Natasha Noel. "writing/trauma." Scholar Commons, 2016. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6303.
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In writing/trauma, I address the association of trauma with knowledge, language, and writing. My discussion first works to establish the relationship between trauma and knowledge. I argue that trauma does not fit into the traditional Enlightenment model of scientific knowledge or the ontological model of what Michele Foucault calls the ‘truth-event.’ Rather, I contend that trauma is unique embodied knowledge, different from that of praxis and normal memory. In general, embodied knowledge is a matter of prenoetic and intentional operations. The body schema and body image maintain a power of plasticity and adjust to new motilities in order to re-establish an equilibrium when disrupted or threatened. In line with this, embodiment involves a sense of temporality, agency, and subjectivity. But in the case of extreme disruption, such as trauma, these fundamental aspects of embodiment are compromised to the point that there is a corruption of the “embodied feeling of being alive.” Physical pain, to some extent, produces this phenomenon. However, the distinctive function of the repetition compulsion within trauma distinguishes it as an exceptional embodied experience unlike physical pain or analogous phenomena. In the case of trauma, an equilibrium is not maintained, similar to the ontology of the accident. Instead, at best, we can say that what takes place is a destructive plasticity, in which the individual is transformed to the point of being a whole new ontological subject.
This phenomenon of destructive plasticity is significant in establishing the relationship of language to trauma-knowledge as trauma is the precise point at which language is ruptured. That is to say, purported within psychanalytic discourse, traumatic experience is observed in a break within the symbolic order. As opposed to physical pain, then, trauma is more akin to the abject, sharing the same resistance to narrative language. Traumatic experience is expressed through semiotic compulsions in the body as a revolt of being. In light of this, I argue that trauma, rather than being treated as a pathology, is a specific embodied knowledge which can be captured in semiotic, poetic language. Moreover, fragmentary writing, the interface of fragmented knowledge and language, captures the disruptive force of traumatic experience. In conclusion, I assert that writing-trauma is valuable, not because it allows for a ‘working through’ of the traumatic experience, but because it is an expression of a distinctly human experience.
My work canvases nineteenth century to contemporary literature on trauma such as Bessel van der Kolk in the neurobiological discipline, literary critics including Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub, Dominick LaCapra, et al, and the psychoanalytic theorists Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. I draw from such literature to analyze the ambiguous impossible-possibility of witnessing and giving testimony of traumatic experience in history and writing, as well as the concern with trauma and language specific to the repetition compulsion and the unconscious. Yet, my primary focus is on the contribution of philosophy to the ongoing discourse of trauma. I look to philosophical thinkers such as Michele Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche to depict the types of epistemological models traditionally addressed within the history of philosophy. My analysis of phenomenology and embodiment is mainly informed by the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Shaun Gallagher. Additionally, Catharine Malabou’s work on destructive plasticity provides an understanding of the ontology of the accident, one of the most critical pieces to my work. Additionally, the works of Elaine Scarry and Julia Kristeva help to disclose the intimate relationship between language and trauma. I also incorporate the work of Gloria Anzalúa along with Julia Kristeva to describe the multi-dimensionality of poetic language and how this is what allows for an articulation of embodied trauma-knowledge. Finally, Maurice Blanchot’s depiction of the disaster and fragmentary writing best captures writing-trauma as it is, like trauma, a process of fragmenting language and meaning.
My purpose is to make clear the value of poetic language and fragmentary writing in regard to knowing and writing trauma. The significance to philosophy is that my discussion bridges the phenomenological and epistemological perspectives with that of the literary in order to engage in philosophical discussion on the implications and value of traumatic experience for understanding the human condition. It is my observation that the more we experience trauma, the more valuable artistic expression becomes, and the more we are pressed within the philosophical tradition to account for an experience so many individuals suffer.
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Powell, Ethel Anne. "Ghosts of Chances for Redemption via Abjection in Wilson Harris?s Palace of the Peacock and Others." NCSU, 2005. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-06272005-105309/.
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This thesis explores, in three works of literature, possibilities for redemption via abjection. Julia Kristeva?s semanalysis is the primary theoretical tool with which Aphra Behn?s Oroonoko (1688) is examined as a nascent work in Caribbean literature. Next, and central to this thesis, the Guyanese Wilson Harris?s The Palace of the Peacock (1960) is discussed within Kristevan context and within Caribbeanist literary critical context. Mariella, a central and fluid character in Palace, acts as a semiotic agent of destruction and of abjectly sublime redemption for Donne and his crew of river boatmen in pursuit of Other ethnically mixed peoples in Guyana?s interior. Donne?s moment of epiphany, wherein he comes to understand how inhumanely he has treated Others, is followed by his ?second? death and rebirth in a celestial palace (along with the rest of the crew), marking his and their transformation from abject slavers to abjectly sublime and redeemed beings. The semiotic linguistic characteristics of Palace are investigated: while written in the style of Magical Realism, Palace contains lexical and dialectal features stemming from African and Amerindian influences. Flannery O?Connor?s ?Revelation? (1965) is the final work examined. Via legacies of plantation slavery and ensuing discrimination against freed African-Americans, many works of Southern U.S. literature contain qualities of postcolonial literatures, particularly the element of abject Otherness. In ?Revelation? Mrs. Ruby Turpin?s ideas about abject Others are transformed, as she is transformed from an abject avatar of white Southern racism and classism, into an abjectly sublime person who receives a ?revelation? of her wrongs righted in a celestial march of all human beings. Her ?revelation? is markedly similar to Donne?s in Palace, both in what she sees and in the language employed to describe what is revealed to her. In Palace and in ?Revelation,? characters are redeemed by their limitations, by recognition of their abjections, and thus from these abject restrictions. Although Behn?s narrator aborts her encounter with an Other, she comes very close to actualizing abject sublimity as is evinced in a fractured and digressive narrative, indicative of the narrator?s conflicted psyche. At least she is conflicted about New World colonial enterprises and their institutions of brutal enslavement. Rather than abjure abject Otherness, perhaps readers?students of life and of literature?would embrace abjection, the eschewed Otherness within, as a critical agent for and means to the sublime.
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Willoughby, Joanne Margaret. "Dialects of the deject : Djuna Barnes and the effects of abjection upon a language of (dis)ease." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.415594.
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McCaughan, Jill Adair. "Abjection and its correction in ethnographic studies : communication issues in the cultural tourism of Isla Mujeres, Mexico /." The Ohio State University, 1999. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1488191667182705.
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Khalifeh, Areen Ghazi. "Transforming the Law of One : Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath from a Kristevan perspective." Thesis, Brunel University, 2010. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/5236.
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A recent trend in the study of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath often dissociates Confessional poetry from the subject of the writer and her biography, claiming that the artist is in full control of her work and that her art does not have naïve mimetic qualities. However, this study proposes that subjective attributes, namely negativity and abjection, enable a powerful transformative dialectic. Specifically, it demonstrates that an emphasis on the subjective can help manifest the process of transgressing the law of One. The law of One asserts a patriarchal, monotheistic law as a social closed system and can be opposed to the bodily drives and its open dynamism. This project asserts that unique, creative voices are derived from that which is individual and personal and thus, readings of Confessional poetry are in fact best served by acknowledgment of the subjective. In order to stress the subject of the artist in Confessionalism, this study employed a psychoanalytical Kristevan approach. This enables consideration of the subject not only in terms of the straightforward narration of her life, but also in relation to her poetic language and the process of creativity where instinctual drives are at work. This study further applies a feminist reading to the subject’s poetic language and its ability to transgress the law, not necessarily in the political, macrocosmic sense of the word, but rather on the microcosmic, subjective level. Although Sexton and Plath possess similar biographies, their work does not have the same artistic value in terms of transformative capabilities. Transformation here signifies transgressing of the unity of the subject and of the authoritative father, the other within, who has prohibitive social and linguistic powers. Plath, Kristeva’s the “deadmost,” successfully confronts the unity of the law, releasing the death drive through anger. Moreover, Plath’s psychic borders are more fluid because of her ability to identify with the pre-Oedipal mother. This unsettling subject is identified by shifts in texts marked by renewal, transgression, and jouissance. Unlike Sexton, Plath is able to achieve transformation as she oscillates masochistically between the “inside” and the “outside” of her psychic borders, and between the symbolic and the semiotic. Furthermore, this enables Plath to develop the unique “Siren Voice of the Other.” In comparison, Sexton, the “dead/less,” evades any confrontation with the maternal and the performance of death in her poetry. Her case is further complicated by the discovery of a second mother. As a result, passivity becomes a main characteristic of her work. This passivity remains until the maternal abject bursts in her text and she reacts to this by performing cleansing rituals, and gravitating toward a symbolic father. Without the dynamism of transgression, Sexton’s work is heterogeneous but does not achieve ultimate transformation and jouissance. Confessional poetry, in this sense, takes on a new dimension. The life stories of the poets become important not for their pejorative, pathological aspects that focus on narrative mimesis, but rather for their manifestation as an aesthetic process. The subject of the writer becomes important as an aesthetic identity in the poems, which are rooted in real life. The main concern then becomes the aesthetic transformative dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic in her work of art.
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Coertzen, Florence. "ʼn Ondersoek na toleransie en abjeksie in Santa Gamka (Eben Venter) en Een schitterend gebrek (Arthur Japin) /| F. Coertzen." Thesis, North-West University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10394/10601.
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In this dissertation, research is aimed at the multifaceted concepts of tolerance and
abjection, which are becoming increasingly relevant worldwide. The way in which these
terms are integrated into literary works is analysed with reference to two novels, namely
Santa Gamka (2009) by Eben Venter and Een schitterend gebrek (2003) by Arthur Japin.
Both novels include tolerance and abjection as a significant part of their narratives, yet
they originate from two different parts of the world, are set in two different periods of time
and also differ at historical, social-political and individual levels. In this study, the most
signification similarity between the novels is how tolerance and abjection take effect, both
independently and together In both novels, tolerance and abjection are, for various
reasons, problematised. These reasons include: skin colour, beauty, space and borders.
When compared to reality, the manifestation of tolerance and abjection in the novels is
also illuminating, because it reflects the actual situations in their respective countries,
namely South Africa and The Netherlands. The history and views of tolerance in these
two countries can be seen as opposite: South African intolerance is characterised by
apartheid, while the praised tolerance of The Netherlands is known worldwide.
The analysis of the novels focuses on the influence of tolerance and abjection on the
main characters, with the emphasis on the body – not only in terms of physical
appearance, but also sexual practises. The study demonstrates that specific spaces, as
well as spatial displacement, can be linked directly to tolerance and abjection. In
accordance with their spatial migration, the novels show that borders, boundaries and
overstepping boundaries are of the utmost importance to the protagonists. Borders that
are experienced as limiting and result in rejection and intolerance are often
simultaneously a passage to acceptance and tolerance.MA (Afrikaans en Nederlands), North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2014
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Everette, Dennis W. "The Filthiest People Alive: Productions of Urban Spaces and Populations in the Films of John Waters." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1325613384.
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