Julia Kristeva

Walt Whitman's Song of Myself This paper deals with Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" in relation to Julia Kristeva's theories of abjection--my paper does not point to abjection in the text, but rather the significance of the abscence of abjection. This abscence, looming and revolting, arises from Whitman's attemt to refigure a conception of sublimity which delimits the material which can trigger the sublime moment. Whitman's democracy of the sublime is inclusive of those figures on the American

(40). In her theory of “abjection” Kristeva argues that “to each ego its object”, and “to each superego its object” (Approaching abjection, 1). Kristeva sees abjection as the recognition of the want whore we find every meaning, language or desire. It is a process in

The Ocular & Spectatorship Vision and the act of looking is an important and recurring theme in many horror films. In early gothic literature, such as in Guy de Maupassant 's Le Horla, the author presents vision as definitive and universal proof and stresses the importance of seeing as well as the act of showing gore. As a society, we are routinely told ‘seeing is believing ' in the wake of any paranormal or supernatural phenomena, placing weight on the tangible. However, as science and technology

An Assessment of Organicity in Alien Question: In Alien, is organicity portrayed as beauty or repulsiveness? In Alien, a film directed by Ridley Scott in 1979, a crew boards the Nostromos to explore a distress signal. However, once an alien is brought onboard, the crew struggles for their individual survival. There is a constant juxtaposition between the organic and inorganic, and the organic is often heavily associated with the abject, which entails messiness and even violence. Beauty refers to

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, psychoanalyst and feminist writer. Her work on abjection gives an engaging insight into human culture in terms of it’s relationship to larger overarching power structures. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva argues that the oppression of woman in patriarchal societies is constructed through fear of the abject. “The tremendous forcing that consists in subordinating maternal power (whether historical of phantasmic, natural or reproductive.)” (Kristeva, 1982

The horror genre has many lessons to teach us as an audience although being the genre most connected with that of ridiculousness. It is regularly associated with the reaction it seeks from its audience; both emotional and physical. In cinema success is measured by terrifying chills, bloody deaths and the volume of the audiences scream. The appeal of horror narrative in literature, film and theatre lies in the pleasures it associates with fear, suspense and terror; no matter what it is trying to

Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creeds suggests that the use of such pervasive images of transgressive femininity as well as monstrosities in such horror films brand this genre “works of abjection”. Creeds defends her ideology referring to Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror detailing

In his seminal study Gothic, Botting compares Gothic literature in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries with respect to their different ways of addressing terror and horror. He notes that the novel of terror dominated the eighteenth-century gothic writings for its transgressive efficacies. Female Gothic writers examine the terrors of patriarchal oppression while verbalizing the heroine’s anxiety about her entrapment into the confines of domesticity. In other words, the gothic heroine

inclusive space where we recover ourselves.” (Hooks, 1990, p.343) To instead use this site of marginality as a vantage point to gain a formative viewpoint and destabilise the deep structures of power and cultural domination. Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror is an essay

Exclusion as a form of control is contingent upon the belief what you are excluding is the problem. Usually however, what is being excluded, like a criminal, is the symptom of a much bigger problem (a failing education system, poverty…etc). Additionally, the idea that a human can be “fixed” in a psychiatric facility is also contingent on there being one source and one problem that can be identified and dealt with. Humans are complex, and we can’t assume to know how effecting one part will effect