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"I would regard myself as a feminist writer, because I'm a feminist in everything else and one can't compartmentalise these things in one's life." (Angela Carter) "When I became a feminist in 1968, I felt that I'd come home: the first home I ever had that was feminine. And it was very wild and theatrical and erotic, the early feminism." (Michèle Roberts) Angela Carter and Michèle Roberts share a keen interest in gender and sexual identity, but many of their topics seem to mark them as opposites: Roberts's fascination with the impact of religion, motherhood and autobiography on female identity covers areas that Carter shuns in her writings. In reading these two authors parallel and in contr...
This book aims to provide readers with an inclusive reading of Kristevan theories on subjectivity, focusing on semiotic and symbolic phases of the infant, abjection, melancholy, love and revolution. It presents three different types of novels from three well-known female authors in order to study their female characters, who are “subjects in process” trying to overcome their psychological maladies. In each part, different eras have been chosen to see how female subjectivity has changed throughout the Feminist Waves, starting from the Victorian period until the Third Wave. With its feminist stance, this book is expected to appeal to the students, researchers, and academicians, particularly those in the fields of sociocultural studies and literature.
Essays explore the significance of Julia Kristevas concept of intimate revolt for social and political philosophy. Over the last twenty years, French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and novelist Julia Kristeva has explored how global crises threaten peoples ability to revolt. In a context of widespread war, deepening poverty, environmental catastrophes, and rising fundamentalisms, she argues that a revival of inner psychic experience is necessary and empowering. Intimate revolt has become a central concept in Kristevas critical repertoire, framing and permeating her understanding of power, meaning, and identity. New Forms of Revolt brings together ten essays on this aspect of Kristeva�...
In this innovative collection, a distinguished group of international authors dare to think psychoanalytically about the legacies of political violence and suffering in relation to post-traumatic cultures worldwide. They build on maverick art historian Aby Warburg's project of combining social, cultural, anthropological and psychological analyses of the image in order to track the undercurrents of cultural violence in the representational repertoire of Western modernity. Drawing on post-colonial and feminist theory, they analyze the image and the aesthetic in conditions of historical trauma, from enslavement and colonization to the Irish Famine, from Denmark's national trauma about migrants and cartoons to collective shock after 9/11, from individual traumas of loss registered in allegory to newsreels and documentaries on suicide bombing in Israel/Palestine, and from Kristeva's novels to Kathryn Bigelow's cinema.
The Psychopolitics of Food probes into the contemporary ‘foodscape’, examining culinary practices and food habits and in particular the ways in which they conflate with neoliberal political economy. It suggests that generic alimentary and culinary practices constitute technologies of the self and the body and argues that the contemporary preoccupation with food takes the form of ‘rites of passage’ that express and mark the transition from a specific stage of neoliberal development to another vis-à-vis a re-configuration of the alimentary and sexual regimes. Even though these rites of passage are taking place on the borders of cultural bi-polarities, their function, nevertheless, is precisely to define these borders as sites of a neoliberal transitional demand; that is, to produce a cultural bifurcation between ‘eating orders’ and ‘eating dis-orders’, by promoting and naturalising certain social logics while simultaneously rendering others as abject and anachronistic. The book is a worthwhile read for researchers and advanced scholars in the areas of food studies, critical psychology, anthropology and sociology.
By looking at the very specific case of the Greek-speaking Romaniote and the Ladino-speaking Sephardic communities in Southern Greece, Epirus and Macedonia, this book explores the attitudes and policies of the Greek state with regards to the Jewish communities both within its borders and in the areas of the Ottoman Empire it craved. Evdoxios Doxiadis traces the evolution of these policies from the time of Greek independence to the expansion of the Greek state in the early-20th century, telling us a great deal about the Jewish experience and the changing face of modern Greek nationalism in the process. Based on the evidence of numerous Greek consular reports, speeches, memoirs, political inte...
Commentary on Skryabin has struggled to situate an understanding of the composer's music within his idiosyncratic philosophical world views. Early commentators' efforts to do so failed to establish a thorough or systematic approach. And later twentieth-century studies turned away from the composer's ideology, focusing instead on 'the music itself' with an analytic approach that scrutinized Skryabin's harmonic language in isolation from his philosophy. This groundbreaking study revisits the questions surrounding the composer's music within his own philosophy, but draws on new methodological tools, casting Skryabin's music in the light not only of his own philosophy of desire, but of more refined semiotic-psychoanalytical theory and modern techniques of music analysis. An interdisciplinary methodology corrects the narrow focus of Skryabin scholarship of the last century, offering insights from New Musicology and recent music theory that lead to hermeneutical, critically informed readings of selected works.
In Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction: An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh, Bridget Grogan combines theoretical explication, textual comparison, and close reading to argue that corporeality is central to Patrick White’s fiction, shaping the characterization, style, narrative trajectories, and implicit philosophy of his novels and short stories. Critics have often identified a radical disgust at play in White’s writing, claiming that it arises from a defining dualism that posits the ‘purity’ of the disembodied ‘spirit’ in relation to the ‘pollution’ of the material world. Grogan argues convincingly, however, that White’s fiction is far more complex in its approach to the body. Modeling ways in which Kristevan theory may be applied to modern fiction, her close attention to White’s recurring interest in physicality and abjection draws attention to his complex questioning of metaphysics and subjectivity, thereby providing a fresh and compelling reading of this important world author.
The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion draws on the expertise of leading scholars and thinkers to explore the violent origins of culture, the meaning of ritual, and the conjunction of theology and anthropology, as well as secularization, science, and terrorism. Authors assess the contributions of René Girard’s mimetic theory to our understanding of sacrifice, ancient tragedy, and post-modernity, and apply its insights to religious cinema and the global economy. This handbook serves as introduction and guide to a theory of religion and human behavior that has established itself as fertile terrain for scholarly research and intellectual reflection.