The Archaic Mother and Mother and Mother: The Postmodern Poetry of Marianne Moore

Abstract

Childhood language, if we need an object of study; infantile language, certainly: it is within our adult discourse that these potential meanings and topological latencies are at work. We suggest that naming, always originating in a place (the chora, space, topic, subject-predicate), is a replacement for what the speaker perceives as an archaic mother a more or less victorious confrontation, never finished with her. By indicating, as precisely as possible, how the units and minimal operations of any language (and even more so those of discourse) revive, model, transform, and extend the pregnancy that still constitutes the ultimate limit of meaning where, if analysis is lacking, transcendence takes root. -Julia Kristeva, Place Names