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Samuel Beckett as a dramatist is well-known with his contributions to the landscape of British theatre. His plays reverberate with voices of traumatized, marginalized and war-stricken characters, which function as an implicit criticism of the turbulent atmosphere of the 1900s. When Beckett addresses the problems of his time in a covert way, the playwright deconstructs conventional elements of drama by specifying no plot, no setting or no theme. This Beckettian style also becomes manifest in his use of language which is characterized by the presence of segmented structures, pauses, ellipses and even silence. Considering these tenets of Beckettian drama, the thematic concerns of his theatrical productions are assumed to primarily revolve around the issues of nihilism, language, and ontology. Therefore, Beckett's plays are thought to be read through the lenses of distinguished theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva. From among these theorists, the concepts of the semiotic, the symbolic and the semiotic chora of Julia Kristeva as a poststructuralist thinker provide a fertile ground for a theoretical reading of Beckett's play Not I (1972). Relevantly, this paper principally examines the applicability of Kristeva's "semiotic chora" into Beckett's Not I in all aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the concepts of intentionality and unintentionality introduced into the semiotics of the Prague Structural School by Jan Mukařovský. These terms are considered in the context of two other conceptual pairs: 1) the semiotic (le sémiotique) and the symbolic (le symbolique) by Julia Kristeva; and 2) the visual (le visuel) and the visible (le visible) by Georges Didi-Huberman. These concepts, created on the basis of French humanities, can be treated as a development on and complement to Mukařovský's aesthetic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kristeva has a close relationship with China. Not only has she obtained a degree in Chinese and been active in the "China Period" of Tel Quel, but she has also focused on the Chinese language, thought, and culture in both her academic research and her literary work. Kristeva's early concern with Chinese primarily revolved around linguistics and semiotics. Influenced by the Chinese language, she proposed theories such as "logique poétique" and "le paragramme semiology." After the 1970s, Kristeva began to introduce psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives into her research, focusing on understanding the Chinese language from the standpoint of Chinese thought, culture, and historical traditions and considering Chinese as a "tonal language." Since the 1990s and especially in the 21st century, Kristeva further explored the potential for dialogue between Chinese and European cultures within the context of their "encounter." Thus, Kristeva's fascination with the Chinese language has become a prominent case of Western practice in the mutual learning between Chinese and Western literary theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The juxtaposition of dream narratives from Spanish surrealist writer José María Hinojosa's La flor de Californía (1928) and artist Joaquín Peinado's four drawings found interspersed throughout the collection demonstrates a symbiotic relationship between the artist and writer's creative purposes, in true surrealist fashion creating an "image-text." Thus, the present article argues that Peinado's drawings represent a key element for understanding La flor de Californía and should be considered an integral part of the dream texts. Julia Kristeva's ideas on signification and the interplay of the symbolic and the semiotic orders present in poetic creation prove useful in understanding this interplay of image and word. Hinojosa's texts, along with Peinado's drawings, attempt to re-create this process of signification, in which the text, although tied down by the symbolic order—that is, systems and realism—, constantly pushes to evade logic and allow the semiotic to emerge through genotexts. Hinojosa and Peinado's combined creation of drawings and writings are examples of one such attempt to obliterate the social constraints of the symbolic order and allow the reader/viewer to witness indirectly the semiotic processes of the pre-Oedipal phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpretation of the Qur'an, especially the word jihād fī sabīlillāh, is often trapped in a standard interpretation legitimized by closed interpretations. The secure interpretations make the meaning of the word lose its original purpose. This specific interpretation makes the meaning of the word jihād fī sabīlillāh lose its original meaning. This article aims to find a methodological review that might be able to open the veil that closes the interpretation of ijtihad in the original meaning of the jihād fī sabīlillāh pronunciation. Julia Kristeva, as one of the thinkers of poststructuralism, introduced the semanalist concept known for its revolutionary interpretation methodology. This research is a type of qualitative research with the analytical-descriptive method. This study will explain the concepts of Kristeva's interpretation of a text and then applied to the interpretation of the pronunciation of Jihad. The study results conclude that the interpretation of Jihad as war is an institutional meaning. In contrast, the hidden meaning of the pronunciation of Jihad, such as 'sincerity', does not get attention and tends to be neglected.

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According to Kristeva’s psychoanalysis, depression is the result of the loss of a valuable object without a favorable passage from the stage of mourning. This experience is the first event that occurs after the birth of a baby with separation from the mother’s body. The grief of this loss is first represented in the infant’s imagination and then in words. In The Black Sun, Depression, and Melancholy, Kristeva shows how depression manifests itself through language. The present study intends to highlight the semiotic, symbolic, and biophysiological dimensions of depression in Marguerite Duras’ Moderato Cantabile. We try to find a linguistic representation of the process of absence in the text. We will also see how the protagonist can get through the mourning phase and get rid of depression with the help of language signs and symbols. The melancholic seeks a means of communication and despite his great mistrust of language to express the meaning of his pre-signed sensations, he uses it to free himself from sadness. These sensations will emerge from the rhythms, sounds, and forms of his speech. Therefore, these signs and symbols pave the way for communication to receive the meaning of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article teases out elective affinities between Julia Kristeva's theorization of the abject and certain (Afro-)Caribbean writers' figurations of racialized alterity and violence in the (post)colony. It argues that whereas Kristeva relies on the tropes of refuse and the corpse to classify the volatile experience she calls abjection, Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant and others invoke tropes of bareness and monstrosity (i.e. zombies, cannibals) to characterize and denounce racialized violence. It argues that whereas Kristeva relies on an understanding of the abject as intimately tethered to the pre-Oedipal, writers such as Michelle Cliff and Edwidge Danticat offer us exemplary works that tend to the abject and semiotic praxis by imaginatively drawing on the pre-colonial, not least its valuations of matrilineal power and wisdom. The article registers these affinities and speculates on what the differences bespeak about violence vis-à-vis the (M)other and blackness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the role of troubadour lyric in the psychoanalytic theory of Julia Kristeva, particularly her models of the semiotic, the objet a, and the abject. This objective necessarily involves an investigation of her relationship with Lacanian psychoanalysis, and often entails the palimpsestic project of reading Kristeva, reading Lacan, reading troubadour lyric. However, rather than simply documenting the instances of Kristeva’s engagement with lyric, the article expands the textual corpus beyond the lyrics analysed by Lacan and Kristeva in order to outline various ways in which the three textual corpora might illuminate, critique, and speak (back) to each other. The first section suggests that the works of Jaufre Rudel and Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, poets neglected by Kristeva and Lacan, might offer certain compromises between the two theorists on the subject of the semiotic. Focussing on the Thing and objet a, the second section formulates readings of a lyric by Bernart de Ventadorn, exploring ways in which Kristeva’s work might be seen to converge and diverge with both Lacanian and feminist reading practices. The article’s final part argues that the lyrics of the trobairitz suggest new, feminist possibilities for the abject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bernardine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe tells the story of Zuleika, a Sudanese girl, and her search for an identity in the white man's world. Zuleika seeks a place in the symbolic by her avant garde poetry that transgresses the structural and thematic borders of epic writing. The transvestite Venus character attains a maternal role in Zuleika's journey into the self and guides her into the carnivalesque world of the semiotic realm. Therefore, Zuleika's self-discovery in the semiotic chora makes a Kristevan reading possible; Venus's feminine and pre-linguistic world that is abjected by patriarchy can be associated with the semiotic chora and becomes the way of resurrection for Zuleika who is an abject figure as a black woman in Roman Londinium. In this paper, Zuleika's crave for an identity, her attempts to form a separate "self" and her poetry as a way of survival will be studied in parallel to Kristeva's theory of subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper intends to unfold the concept of Intertextuality and its features followed by various instances. The term intertextuality was coined by Julia Kristeva who wanted to synthesize Ferdinand de Saussure's semiotics. Almost every work of an author has an influence of some other discourse. It could be intentional or subconscious. The concept intertextuality was originally structured to analyze the argument of an discourse analysis as a part of systematic textual analysis. Juxtaposing or relating one or many works can lead to many similarities or to a better understanding of a particular text. Juxtaposing or relating or combining brings out the intertextuality. The research paper mainly focuses on the two features of intertextuality with adequate exemplifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cincinnati Romance Review is the property of University of Cincinnati, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Since the 1990s, narratives about homelessness for and about young people have proliferated around the world. A cluster of thematic elements shared by many of these narratives of the age of globalization points to the deep anxiety that is being expressed about a social, economic, and cultural system under stress or struggling to find a new formation. More surprisingly, many of the narratives also use canonical cultural texts extensively as intertexts. This article considers three novels from three different national traditions to address the work of intertextuality in narratives about homelessness: Skellig by UK author David Almond, which was published in 1998; Chronicler of the Winds by Swedish author Henning Mankell, which was first published in 1988 in Swedish as Comédia Infantil and published in an English translation in 2006; and Stained Glass by Canadian author Michael Bedard, which was published in 2002. Using Julia Kristeva's definition of intertextuality as the "transposition of one (or several) sign systems into another," I propose that all intertexts can be thought of as metaphoric texts, in the precise sense that they carry one text into another. In the narratives under discussion in this article, the idea of homelessness is in perpetual motion between texts and intertexts, ground and figure, the literal and the symbolic. What the child characters and the readers who take up the position offered to implied readers are asked to do, I argue, is to put on a way of seeing that does not settle, a way of being that strains forward toward the new. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Langage & Societe is the property of Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Bluebeard folktale is (re)produced in Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) as the featured performance in a pageant that a minister organizes for his colonial New Zealand congregation. This construction-en-abyme is representative of intertextuality in terms of Julia Kristeva's "affirmative negativity." The paper explores intertextuality in The Piano as an agent of a multiplex and extra-lingual dialogism linked to FEMININITY and the female gaze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay applies Julia Kristeva's "Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia" (1987) to Jean Rhys's fourth novel, "Good Morning, Midnight" (1939). Kristeva maintains in "Black Sun" that the root of women's depression lies in their thwarted mourning for the lost maternal—their refusal to separate from the mother and enter into language and society. Most people separate from—Kristeva says "negate"—the mother and subsequently recover her in signs, in language. Depressives, however, "disavow the negation: they cancel it out, suspend it, and nostalgically fall back on the real object (the Thing) of their loss, which is just what they do not manage to lose, to which they remain painfully riveted" (Kristeva, "BS" 43). Denying the negation blocks normative language and social development. "Black Sun," then, yields significant insights into the heroine of Rhys's novel, Sasha Jansen, whose seemingly aberrant behavior and nonsensical language may now be understood as symptoms of Kristevan depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]