SIR PAUL NURSE’S GENETICIST’S TALES - CASE STUDY OF A COMPLEX FAMILY TREE NARRATIVE

Melancholy Ontology, Evental Ethics, and the Lost (m)Other in Howard Barker’s Theatre of Catastrophe:An Analysis of 13 Objects Alireza Fakhrkonandeh (bio) Without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play. —Julia Kristeva, Black Sun1 [The play] is not about life as it is lived at all, but about life as it might be lived, about the thought which is not licensed, and about the abolished unconscious. —Howard Barker, Arguments2 Howard Barker (1946–) creates a tragic world, the avowed arché and telos of which are death. However, far from being tantamount to cessation, nihilistic terminus, or the perfection of life, death comes to designate not just the unknown, but the unknowable. It thus involves a state of nonknowledge that forecloses the normative values of use and exchange, and the orders of meaning and morality.3 As such, death in Barker’s Theatre of Catastrophe features as essentially inscrutable, being at once phenomenon and nonphenomenon, which is to say, neither phenomenologically perceptible nor representable, belonging to the order of enigma, secret, and silence.4 Barker refers to his Art of Theatre as “crucially an art of death” and, endowing it with an ontologically liminal position, locates his theatre on the bank of the river, which serves as the border between the dead and the living.5 He declares tragedy “the labour of death” and characterizes tragic art primarily as an art that promotes the “feeling for death.”6 Resonant with Schopenhauer’s attestation to the pivotal role of death in human life and thought—whereby death is “the real inspiring genius or the Muse of philosophy,” without which “there would [End Page 365] hardly have been any philosophizing”—Barker discerns death as the most fundamental subject of art and philosophy, declaring it “the subject of all philosophy and all theatre.”7 Resonant with the later Freud’s postulation of death as a fundamental drive and ultimate aim of life (“life is a detour to death”)8 and Heidegger’s ontological-existential consideration of death as immanent in human life,9 Barker observes: “Tragedy’s a priori—that we live only to be destroyed by life—renders the notion of wrong decisions meaningless.”10 Indeed, death constitutes a crux around which other aesthetic principles of Barker’s tragic drama—prominent among which are ethical speculation, contradiction, pain, anxiety, loss, and excess—constellate. Notably for present purposes, having defined the objects of “loss” as (rational, utilitarian, commonsensical, and empirical modes of) “knowledge” and “morality,” he proceeds to associate it with melancholy: “The State of Loss describes a state of lost morality, an ethical vacuum, a denial, a rebuke to order, a melancholy and a pain.”11 Relatedly, as is pervasively evident in his theoretical and dramatic works, pain is pivotal to Barker’s tragic work in thematic, dynamic, and aesthetic terms. Pain, as Barker emphasizes, should be perceived as “not disorder but necessity.” Barker recognizes pain as “spiritually necessary” to the “tragic sensibility,”12 which—considering its association with loss, contradiction, complexity, ethical ambiguity, and transgression—fosters “a melancholy beauty,” which serves as the “whole justification for his theatre.”13 More specifically, Barker establishes a firm, yet fraught, relationship between love, pain, and beauty (though death is also intimately bound up with these three), and molds them into a tension-laden manifold. The ensuing statement confirms the point at issue, with Barker defining his Theatre of Catastrophe as “a theatre…which insists on complexity and pain, and the beauty that can only be created from the spectacle of pain. In Catastrophe…lies the possibility of reconstruction.”14 This aesthetics of loss and excess, this poetics of sacrifice, acquires further dimensions when juxtaposed with the crucial questions of nihilism, the death of God, and ontological inadequacy (that is, the poverty of existence and the paucity of possibility of human existence and experience)—questions with which Barker’s characters are obsessed.15 These features drive us inexorably to the question of melancholia in Barker, [End Page 366] but they also constitute focal points of both modernity and its diagnostic critique both in continental philosophy and modernist literature. The melancholic strain in Barker’s drama...

Reviewed by: Exemplary Ethics in Ancient Rome by Rebecca Langlands J. Mira Seo Rebecca Langlands. Exemplary Ethics in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 368 pp. Cloth, $99.99. While exempla and discourses of exemplarity are understood as distinctive to Roman cultural practice, as scholars we tend to take their existence for granted in our analyses of Roman literature, history, or philosophy. Elite Roman authors utilize them, and our task is to explain how and why they function. Building on the work of Jane Chaplin, Matthew Roller, David Levene, and others, this monograph distinguishes itself from previous accounts of Roman exemplarity in two significant ways: (1) The scope of the periods and texts under examination is far more comprehensive than that of any earlier studies on the topic, and (2) The framework of "exemplary ethics" focuses on the practice of using exempla and on what about these particular vignettes or stories makes them didactically productive in generating ethical awareness and even growth. Even as its synthetic approach owes an acknowledged debt to Roller's groundbreaking 2004 article, "Exemplarity in Roman Culture: the Cases of Horatius Cocles and Cloelia" (CP 99:1–56), attention to ethical praxis ("exemplary ethics") reveals unexpected features and details in these most familiar tales. As Langlands explains, although the characters and scenarios may be relatively fixed in repetition, exempla are persistent and useful because of their essential hermeneutic ambiguity, not by embodying a single established lesson as one might expect. In two enlightening chapters, Langlands explores this indeterminacy as a feature, not a bug, of exemplary thinking that contributes to their educational capacity (chapter 2, "The Special Capacity of Exemplary Stories," and chapter 7, "Indeterminacy of Exempla: Interpretation, Motivation and Improvisation"). Given the broad chronological and generic scope of the evidence, in chapter 1 Langlands isolates a few specific narratives as "archetypes" (Mucius Scaevola, Fabius Maximus Cunctator, and T. Manlius Torquatus) and returns to these examples consistently throughout the work. While chapters 2–4 establish the practice of exemplary ethics by relying on these synthetic, archetypal narratives, precise case studies and close readings of individual literary and philosophical texts illustrate the complexity of exemplarity as an instructional medium for ethical education. These close readings ground the methodological reframing of exemplary ethics in the early chapters and demonstrate the payoff of potentially abstract concepts like the "site of exemplarity" (related to studies in cultural memory, 173 and chapter 8 passim). In describing a site of exemplarity as a "heterogeneous field of reference" (175, original emphasis) rather than a singular point—that is, the exemplum itself—Langlands' analysis explains contradictions inherent in the exemplary tradition as productive ethical features. Chapter 12, "Controversial Thinking through Exempla," explores "controversiality" in two detailed readings: a debate in De finibus between Cicero and Lucius Torquatus on the latter's distinguished ancestor, T. Manlius Torquatus, and the problematic and contradictory figure of Regulus in multiple literary works. As Langlands states, [End Page 311] "It is a characteristic of exempla (or sites of exemplarity) to possess ethical ambiguities, conflicts or difficulties that stimulate such ethical debate and reflection" (258). This chapter well illustrates the interplay between cultural consensus and indeterminacy in two different kinds of "controversial thinking": in De finibus, Langlands shows how the interlocutors use "a tale whose possession of moral and cultural value is ultimately not in question, and used it to consider some highlevel philosophical questions about what might count as moral value, what kind of motivation for deeds would count as a good one, and what, in the end, counts as good in human life" (266). In the second case, Livy's debate between Scipio and Fabius on Regulus initially provides another illustration of a controversial exemplum deployed in rhetoric, which Langlands then expands to consider the contradictory accounts and interpretations found in Diodorus Siculus, Valerius Maximus, Cicero in De officiis, and Horace C. 3.5. Although these transformations and inconsistencies may seem to contradict the notion of consensus in cultural memory, Langlands explores how the Regulus exemplum functions differently in each of the works to demonstrate a range of ethical reactions. Regulus' essential indeterminacy as an exemplum makes the figure especially fungible for diverse literary and...

“I am spinning this for you, my child”:Voice and Identity Formation in George MacDonald’s Princess Books Ruth Y. Jenkins (bio) Abstract By applying Julia Kristeva’s theories of the dynamic relationship between the semiotic and symbolic, Jenkins illustrates the complicated relationships between voice and identity formation that are central to MacDonald’s Princess books and his adolescent readers. Jenkins shows how the harmonic imagination that MacDonald constructs in The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1882) enable and replicate the process of identity formation. Consequently, rather than reiterate culturally prescribed scripts for fixed identities, narratives such as MacDonald’s Princess books may provide alternative descriptions and opportunities for non-conventional experience. George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1882) have long captivated readers of both children's literature and adult fantasy. Equally fascinated, scholars continue to direct critical attention toward these narratives from spiritual to folkloric, literary to linguistic perspectives.1 Recently William N. Gray, in "George MacDonald, Julia Kristeva, and the Black Sun," and Deborah Thacker, in "Feminine Language and the Politics of Children's Literature," have reexamined MacDonald's texts using current psychoanalytic theories of language and identity.2 Both apply the concepts of Julia Kristeva to his texts, but whereas Gray shows how Phantastes (1858) illustrates individual transformation from an object-relations perspective, Thacker reconsiders the Princess books through feminist reworkings of Lacanian theory. Although Gray and Thacker produce fresh readings of MacDonald's texts, neither sufficiently articulates the extent to which Kristeva's theories illuminate the richness of the Princess books in the context of his spiritual beliefs and identity formation. Kristeva's description of the dynamic relationship between the semiotic (noncommunicative articulations) and symbolic (signification) is useful for understanding the signifying process as it relates to identity formation. Like a thin membrane through which the semiotic permeates, the thetic phase functions as a "threshold" of language and organizes semiotic energy into the symbolic (Revolution 45); energy that cannot yet be so organized remains semiotic. The tic phase posits the signifiable object, the deepest structure of possibility (Revolution 54; Moi 99). Named "transposition" by Kristeva, this process highlights the passage from one sign system to another, a passage that involves an "altering of [End Page 325] the thetic position—the destruction of the old position and the formation of a new one" (59). 3 Transposition, then, produces the "plural, shattered" quality of the object of enunciation, and consequently, "polysemy can also be seen as the result of a semiotic polyvalence—an adherence to different sign systems" (59-60). Understanding the polyvalence that occurs in transposition is central to recognizing the value of texts such as MacDonald's for the adolescent reader and even their significance as textual constructions. Although Gray does not consider Phantastes in the context of an adolescent audience, his reading of that text has implications for analyzing the relationship between those readers and the texts. Gray points to the failure of MacDonald "to follow through Kristeva's dialectic of the semiotic and symbolic" at the conclusion of Phantastes, a failure that results in a "precariousness of the subject-position" (891). I would like to suggest, however, that this "precariousness of subject-position" is key to understanding both MacDonald's vision and the value of his texts for adolescent readers. Kristeva posits that the "thetic originates in the 'mirror stage' and is completed . . . in puberty" (Revolution 62), psychological stages central to identity formation. Adolescents, at their own threshold to adulthood, negotiate various energies and drives—verbal, emotional, and physical—in their efforts to transition into socially functioning adults. Consequently, analyzing how MacDonald's Princess books illustrate the thetic phase may demonstrate their continued significance as adolescent literature. Kristeva compares the dialectical interplay between the semiotic and symbolic to weaving, yet she emphasizes that unlike finished cloth, this dynamic is not static (Revolution 5).4 The "threads" spun by semiotic drives produce the genotext, which creates poetic language; the "threads" from social, cultural, syntactic, and grammatical forces are the phenotext, which insures communication (5). Consequently, the genotext is the "advent'" of the symbolic and organizes "a space in which the subject is...

The purpose of this chapter is to explore how Julia Kristeva’s approach to embodiment and boundary work extends understandings of how vulnerability, disgust, horror and uncertainty shape healthcare practices. Kristeva’s oeuvre is based in Lacanian psychoanalytic theories and concepts as well as approaches from social and literary studies. In the case of this chapter, the focus is on her theorisation of the psychological defence mechanism of abjection — a response to the abject, where identity, order or system are thrown into disarray. The abject, which is our focus here, is the abject body, but the abject can also be social situations and activities that are polluting, betrayals of what is considered ‘right’, and social positions that are considered defiled, stigmatised or associated with what destabilises our sense of certainty. Such an analysis affords the possibility of voicing both the significance and incomprehensibility of bodies that leak, the chaos of illness and disease, and their sometime monstrosity. An analysis of abjection situates much that is deemed ‘out of place’ in healthcare. As this is the case, I draw on instances of health-related practices to show the relevance of the emotional defence of abjection to explanations about lack of boundaries, sullying of subjectivities and what is in operation when various attempts to regain boundedness and certainty are mobilised.

This paper is a psychoanalytic literary study of the online performance Domestic Tension (2007) by the Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal. Fundamentally built on the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection is well suited to be the critical tool to analyse the online performance Domestic Tension. This paper questions the performance as a manifestation of abjection that espouses Bilal’s anti-Iraq War stance, by exposing the killing of thousands of Iraqis by the US drones. Furthermore, it investigates how the Brechtian theatrical techniques are used to restrain the cathartic experience of the viewers-cum-shooters, inviting them to ‘disavow’ Bilal’s body, abstain from any cannibalistic desires, and finally to think of the consequences of the US invasion of Iraq. Keywords: Domestic Tension; Wafaa Bilal; Julia Kristeva; Abjection; Cyborg

In this June 2004 interview, Julia Kristeva takes us through her long and extraordinary career as a writer, an intellectual, and an academic. She speaks of her early years as a radical poststructuralist, postmodern feminist, and discusses how her scope has broadened with the addition of psychoanalytical theory and practice. She answers questions about her work on the abject, melancholy, motherhood, and love, and reveals how personal experiences, like the death of her father, have shaped parts of her literary output.

Reviewed by: Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta Michael Crutcher Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta. Riche Richardson . University of Georgia Press: Athens, GA. 2007. 304 pp. $22.95 paper(ISBN: 0820328901) At the 2008 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, five sessions related to literature and humanities appeared in the program, an increase from only one at the 2007 meeting. The increase may have been related to the AAG's co-sponsorship of a symposium on Geography and the Humanities the previous summer. Both the symposium and the sessions, however, were likely inspired by a larger movement afoot in academia to bring concerns of geography, space, and place together with critiques of representation. The results of this nascent union [End Page 260] are writings that disturb the traditional boundaries of academic writing, leading to more robust and nuanced constructions of issues including identity, race, gender, and class. Unfortunately, when scholars incorporate theories and literatures from outside their specialization, there can be a tendency, especially in innovative research, for outcomes that don't necessarily hit their mark. One such example is Riche Richardson's book Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta. Richardson's goal is to explore the "typically unrecognized historical and contemporary aspects of black southern masculine representation. . .as they have been manifest in such contexts as literature and film" (p. 19). The representation Richardson is referring to is that of the Southern Black male developed during slavery and the decades following the Civil War, which depicted African American men as hypersexualized (and therefore a threat to white women) and/or ignorant (therefore incapable of governing). Whites constructed these representations in order to justify terrorizing African Americans and keeping them disenfranchised. Richardson maintains these representations, whether embodied as the Black rapist or dancing and shuffling Jim Crow, became tropes that have continually been redeployed in fiction, movies, and music. Richardson, trained in literature with specializations in southern and African American studies, finds that despite its insights, postmodern theories are insufficient to study questions of southern identity because they privilege the urban. Post-structural cultural geographers, however, with their emphasis on identity as shaped by place, seem more appealing to Richardson. In making her argument Richardson cites the work of several prominent geographers. She draws most heavily, however, on the work of David Sibley and others who incorporate psychoanalytic theory in their work. Richardson is particularly interested in theories of abjection drawn from Julia Kristeva which posit that psychologically, we expel or distance ourselves from things perceived as "impure." The constant threat of contact and contamination with the expelled generates anxiety in the subject. In Richardson's formulation, the African American male is constructed as the abject in the U.S. imaginary. The choice to draw on Sibley is curious because it doesn't include the most compelling aspect of his work, which following Meade, extends the separation of the subject and the abject to the material world (creating the ecological self and the ecological order). Psychoanalytic theory becomes then, a way of understanding how people think about and negotiate abject spaces. There is little doubt that the Southern Black male possesses abject-like qualities, but the processes that demonized the black subject are just as likely socially constructed for reasons not explained by psychoanalytic theory. Geographer David Jansson for example, has written several articles about the South and Southern identity framed by the concept of internal orientalism. In Black Masculinity in the South Richardson traces the reproduction of the marginalized Black Southern male in books, films and music. The fact that negative representations of African American males derived from Southern myths get reproduced in fiction and movies like The Clans-man and Birth of a Nation is not that surprising. [End Page 261] What is surprising however, and where Richardson excels, is in identifying the way African American authors and filmmakers have internalized and reproduced these Southern myths in their works. Richardson identifies the way that characterizations of Southern Black men, initially developed by whites, have been elaborated by Blacks to condemn those that aren't seen as advancing...

A familiar criticism leveled against Julia Kristeva's philosophy is that it is essentialist..1 Feminist critics such as Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, and Toril Moi take issue with Kristeva's conceptions of the chora, maternity, and the semiotic arguing that in invoking these Kristeva is positing some female essence. Critics link her idea of the chora with a maternal receptacle, which they link with her semiotic aspect of signification and with woman. They make claims about Kristeva's supposed "compulsory maternity," about her quietude in the face of an "implacable symbolic structure." The concern among many feminists is that in Kristeva's philosophy woman is linked necessarily with the maternal and that she is powerless to change a male-- driven symbolic order. "Ahistorical, biologically reductive,... universalist-the list of crimes of which Kristeva is found guilty, under the guise of essentialism, abounds," notes Tina Chanter (Oliver 1993a, 182). The charges revolve around two points. One is that Kristeva works within a psychoanalytic model, which many critics take to be patent proof that she accepts the sex roles that psychoanalytic theory recognizes. Accordingly, Chris Weedon criticizes Kristeva on the grounds that "to take on the Freudian and Lacanian models is implicitly to accept the Freudian principles of psycho-sexual development with their universalist patriarchal implications and their reduction of subjectivity to sexuality" (as quoted in Chanter 1993). This charge makes three questionable assumptions: (1) that to use psychoanalytic theory is to accept it in toto; (2) that psychoanalytic theory necessarily relies on universal rather than culturally specific sex roles; and (3) that it recognizes only sexual or biological influences. The other charge often leveled against her is that in her own linguistic theory the semiotic (poetic, disruptive, potentially revolutionary) aspect of communication supposedly draws on or is identified with the maternal body and that this semiotic aspect is ultimately powerless in the face of the symbolic (logical, orderly) aspect of communication that is none other than the law of the father. Accordingly, Jacqueline Rose writes that "Kristeva has ... been attractive to feminism because of the way that she exposes the complacent identities of psycho-sexual life. But as soon as we try to draw out of that exposure an image of femininity which escapes the straitjacket of symbolic forms, we fall straight into that essentialism and primacy of the semiotic which is one of the most problematic aspects of her work" (Oliver 1993a, 53). Nancy Fraser's criticism is less subtle: Despite [Kristeva's] explicit criticisms of gynocentrism, there is a strand of her thought that implicitly partakes of it-I mean Kristeva's quasi-biologistic, essentializing identification of women's femininity with maternity. Maternity, for her, is the way that women, as opposed to men, touch base with the pre-Oedipal, semiotic residue. (Men do it by writing avant-garde poetry; women do it by having babies.) Here Kristeva dehistoricizes and psychologizes motherhood, conflating conception, pregnancy, birthing, nursing, and childrearing, abstracting all of them from sociopolitical context, and erecting her own essentialist stereotype of femininity. (Fraser 1992, 190) In this passage, Fraser faults Kristeva for being essentialist, and here clearly she has biological essentialism in mind. But Fraser also notes another, seemingly opposite, theme in Kristeva's work. Fraser writes that Kristeva "reverses herself and recoils from her construct, insisting that 'women' do not exist, that feminine identity is fictitious, and that feminist movements therefore tend toward the religious and the proto-totalitarian" (190). Fraser is clearly mystified, writing, "she ends up alternating essentialist gynocentric moments with anti-- essentialist nominalistic moments, moments that consolidate an ahistorical, undifferentiated, maternal feminine gender identity with moments that repudiate women's identities altogether" (190). …

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

In the late seventies and early eighties (around 1981, in Jane Gallop's memorable formulation), utopia still seemed at hand. The energies of the defeated revolutionary political and counter cultural movements of the sixties seemed to have been channeled into feminism. For some feminist theorists and critics working in literary academia, the revolution of the word, that fabulous legacy of the twentieth-century avant-gardes, seemed to have become the revolution itself. Experimental writing—writing that disrupts conventional modes of signification and provides alternatives to them—was, for literature, the site of this revolution. Through the work of continental poststructuralists and psychoanalytic theorists, particularly Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, we (academic feminists, almost entirely Euro-American and white) assembled an arsenal of ideas and analyses that we thought would change the world, as sixties activism had failed to do.

In Listening Subjects, David Schwarz uses psychoanalytic techniques to probe the visceral experiences of music listeners. Using classical, popular, and avant-garde music as texts, Schwarz addresses intriguing questions: why do bodies develop goose bumps when listening to music and why does music sound so good when heard 'all around'. By concentrating on music as cultural artefact, Listening Subjects shows how the historical conditions under which music is created affect the listening experience. Schwarz applies the ideas of post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists Slavoj Zizek, Julia Kristeva, and Kaja Silverman to an analysis of diverse works.In a discussion of John Adams' opera Nixon in China, he presents music listening as a fantasy of being enclosed in a second skin of enveloping sound. He looks at the song cycles of Franz Schubert as an examination and expression of epistemological doubts at the advent of modernism, and traverses fantasy 'space' in his exploration of the white noise at the end of the Beatles' I Want You (She's So Heavy). Schwarz also considers the psychosexual undercurrent in Peter Gabriel's Intruder and the textual and ideological structures of German Oi Musik.Concluding with a reading of two compositions by Diamanda Gales, he reveals how some performances can simultaneously produce terror and awe, abjection and rage, pleasure and displeasure. This multi-layered study transcends other interventions in the field of musicology, particularly in its groundbreaking application of literary theory to popular and classical music. Schwarz's theory of listening blends music history and theory, psychoanalysis, cultural contexts, technology, and the body - all concepts that inform the kinetic representation of sounds called 'music'. Listening Subjects will be a valuable text for students and scholars of musicology, psychoanalytic theory, and popular culture.

This article, co-authored by Ildikó Rippel and Rosie Garton of Zoo Indigo Theatre Company, explores two performance works; Under the Covers (2009) and Blueprint (2012), devised and performed by the duo. Both works present live video links to family members of the performers. In Under the Covers the live video was streamed from the bedrooms of the performers’ four young children, and the duo asked the audience to babysit their sleeping children so that they could ‘get on with the show’ (Zoo Indigo 2009). In Blueprint live video links brought the performers’ mothers (four in total) into the performance space.On occasions during the touring of both of these works, the relationship between the live performers on stage and the live streamed family members on screen caused unscripted reactions from the performers on stage. During a performance of Under the Covers, one of the crying babies prompted a let down effect for a breastfeeding performer. In Blueprint the sharing of anecdotes caused a performer on stage to cry. In these occasions the leaking of bodily fluids of milk and tears caused a momentary leakage of the Real into the Symbolic framework of theatre. This article uses the experience of performing these works to argue that the maternal body in performance has the capacity to cause a rupture, a fracture within representation, for a rapturous Real to emerge. The article draws on Psychoanalytical theory, specifically Jaques Lacan’s discussion of the Real, and Julia Kristeva’s writing on the semiotic chora.

This paper offers a comparative literary analysis of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (1930), focusing on the characters of Miss Havisham and Emily Grierson. By examining intersecting themes such as decay, isolation, and emotional stasis, the study explores how both authors utilize Gothic elements to critique social norms, gender expectations, and the psychological consequences of betrayal and loss. Drawing on psychoanalytic and feminist literary criticism, it argues that Miss Havisham and Emily Grierson embody extreme responses to trauma, evolving into haunting figures of feminine decline. Engaging with critical perspectives from Hilary Schor, Judith Fetterley, Rosemarie Bodenheimer, John Lucas, Noel Polk, and Julia Kristeva, the paper situates these women within broader discourses on trauma, memory, and the grotesque. Ultimately, the comparison reveals how their emotional stagnation serves as a metaphor for wider cultural crises—the disintegration of Victorian idealism and the decay of the Old South. Keywords: Emotional stasis, Gothic literature, Miss Havisham, Emily Grierson, feminist criticism, psychoanalytic theory, cultural decay.

Sarah Kane’s debut Blasted depicts the main character Ian in a state of existential crisis at the end of the play. He dies and is later reborn, which can be analysed as a complex staging of the process of subject formation when approached from a psychoanalytical point of view. Julia Kristeva’s conception of the subject’s development and especially her notion of the abject are well suited to describe some of the gruesome actions that occur in Kane’s plays. Applying Kristeva’s psychoanalytical theory may serve to show that underlying these actions of horror is more than a rebellious will to shock the audience. In this article, I want to explore the incidents of abjection in Blasted in regard to Ian’s development, focusing on the final scene where a breakdown and (re)formation of the subject takes place. The staging of a genesis of the subject in this scene is furthermore underscored by strong references to the biblical account of creation through God in seven days. By facing abjection, the subject comes into contact with the semiotic stage of being: a pre–linguistic state, a state of crisis. Religious structures serve as the symbolic order that tries to deal with this situation. Ian vividly portrays the subject’s struggle between the semiotic and the symbolic, the abject and the religious order – a struggle that is inherent in the general human condition.

A Worm in the Apple: French Critical Theory and the Metaphor of the Child in the Work of Atwood and Broner Sally L. Kitch Wichita State University What is at stake is to move from a patriarchal society, of class and ofreligion . . . this process involves going through what is repressed in discourse, in reproductive and productive relationships. (Kristeva, "La femme" 141) Julia Kristeva's statement represents perhaps the most challenging aspect of recent French critical theory—the linking of discourse, with its feet in the camps of both communicative and literary language, to the key elements of a gendered culture, reproduction and production. In Kristeva's view, literature has cultural rather than simply Cultural implications, and the task of literary criticism becomes a political rather than simply an aesthetic act. Literary critics also become cultural critics as Kristeva and other French theorists of discourse reveal key relationships between the individual's acquisition and uses of language and the structures and relationships ofculture, including the structures and relationships that have produced patriarchy. This view of discourse identifies language as the crucible in which the individual meets the culture and through which he/she adapts to its mandates. As constructions in language, literary works participate in those cultural mandates and document the inevitable compromises of individuals to their culture. Because they are rooted in psychoanalytic theory, such theories of discourse also assert a connection between literature and the individual unconscious. Therefore, these theories also suggest ways in which literary works can disrupt fixed cultural relationships through their release of repressed and hidden language and imagery. Psychoanalytic theory describes an individual's entry into the Symbolic Order of Language and Law (of the Fathers)—the patriarchy—as coincidental with the oedipal crisis. At that stage, the child experiences the loss of the maternal body and the repression of desire for the mother and for imaginary unity with her and the world. The phallus symbolizes this loss and separation, as well as the Symbolic Order itself. Repressed pre-oedipal experience and affects—regarded 35 36Rocky Mountain Review as "feminine"—reside post-oedipally in the unconscious, dubbed by several theorists as the Imaginary. Such a theoretical underpinning has often been viewed as contradictory to the goals of American feminism, grounded as it is in "ethical discourse as prescription for action" (Jardine 43). Yet, in its French interpretation, psychoanalysis supports a fundamental insight ofthe American women's movement—"the personal is political." Seen from one perspective, both the American slogan and the French theories imply that individuals speak, act, and identify themselves from within culture, according to its power structures and world view rather than according to their own desires (which are often hidden from their conscious minds). Included in the conflation of personal and political, therefore, is the construction of gender: men and women speak and act as culturally gendered beings who have internalized externally imposed definitions and role expectations for their sex. Conversely, both feminism and psychoanalysis also suggest that all apparently personal acts of individuals must be understood as having public, political significance. Such common ground cannot, of course, eliminate the differences between French critical theories and American feminism, including the continuing controversy over the very term "feminist." There have been some recent signs ofmerger, however. Through exposure to AngloAmerican feminism, the French have acknowledged the need to connect their theories ofgender with the lives ofactual women (Jardine 42-47). By the same token, French theories have already heightened the awareness of American feminists that patriarchy runs deeper than the policies and actions of government and other public institutions. Because of French influence, American feminists have begun to recognize the importance of unconscious levels of sexism, embedded in the psychology of Western family structures and derived from ideologies of gender endemic to those and other Western structures. French theories have been particularly compelling in the field of feminist literary criticism through their concepts of language acquisition and use. In literature, as in the individual psyche, language signifies both the compromise of individual desire—via the Symbolic Order—and the expression ofthat desire—via the potential expression ofrepressed material stored in the Imaginary. Because ofthe structures of Western culture, the Imaginary has "feminine" overtones...