Melodrama, folhetim e teledramaturgia: de Alexandre Dumas a Gilberto Braga, a interseção entre os gêneros

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo estabelecer, pelo viés da Literatura Comparada, pontos de interseção entre o plano de vingança engendrado pelas personagens, Edmond Dantès, no romance-folhetim O Conde de Monte-Cristo de Alexandre Dumas, e Norma Pimentel na telenovela Insensato Coração de Gilberto Braga e Ricardo Linhares. Além de apresentar um histórico da formação, assim como a evolução dos gêneros, melodrama, folhetim e teledramaturgia. Este trabalho surgiu da vontade de revolver intertextos de obras, em diferentes gêneros, que até hoje garantem uma continuidade de aspectos de absorção do grande público. Princípios teóricos como aqueles de Julia Kristeva sobre intertextualidade, assim como os princípios de arquitexto e hipertexto, propostos por Gérard Genette são tomados como norteadores da análise. Pretendemos, também, refletir a respeito das ideias trabalhadas por Pierre Bourdieu sobre o capital simbólico e o capital econômico das obras, trazendo à tona uma discussão sobre o valor da produção artística, considerando a sua recepção pelo seu respectivo público

Signos incógnitos: marcas da poética de João Cabral na obra de Ana Cristina Cesar

O trabalho tem por objetivo identificar eventuais marcas da poética de João Cabral de Melo Neto na obra de Ana Cristina Cesar. Pertencente ao grupo de poetas que ficou conhecido, em meados da década de 1970, como geração mimeógrafo ou grupo da poesia marginal, a autora de A teus pés, assim como seus demais companheiros, afirmava, publicamente, que fazia uma poesia anticabralina por excelência. No entanto, sua obra parece desmentir essas afirmações, por meio de um diálogo tenso e desviante embora de incorporação e recusa simultâneas com a poesia cabralina, o que motivou a poeta carioca a, inclusive, reescrever, à sua maneira, diversos poemas de João Cabral. A presente dissertação investiga e analisa essas questões, revisa parte da fortuna crítica dos dois autores e realiza um histórico do panorama cultural carioca da época. No plano teórico, são utilizados, principalmente, conceitos da teoria da influência e do mapa da desleitura, formulados por Harold Bloom, bem como as ideias da verneinung freudiana e do movimento de absorção/destruição textual, descrito por Julia Kristeva. Adotou-se como metodologia a análise comparativa de determinados textos dos poetas estudados

L’isola delle madri assenti: tracce di presenza femminile nella narrativa storica siciliana contemporanea (1990-2007)

The watershed constituted by the historical novels of Leonardo Sciascia (1921- 1989), Vincenzo Consolo (1933-2012) and Andrea Camilleri (born 1925), are starting points for analysing subsequent writings of history in Sicily, particularly those that deal with the hermeneutical function of literature as a means of critically reading official historiography. Nevertheless, whereas ample critical attention has been paid to male writers, whose work is deemed ‘mainstream’, there has been insufficient analysis of the role of female authors in relation to literary representations of Sicilian history. By considering the distinctiveness of the Sicilian literary tradition, the thesis identifies a series of transformations of the genre which have occurred in recent years within the context of feminine writing, and examines the historical narratives of contemporary Sicilian writers Maria Attanasio, Silvana La Spina and Maria Rosa Cutrufelli produced between 1990 and 2007. The study problematizes the lack of critical debate about feminine narratives in Sicily, and places these works in relation to developments in gender and genre theory, focusing particularly on Margherita Ganeri’s studies on the historical genre and the canon. After an introductory chapter which argues the case for examining Sicilian female historical fiction as a distinct literary practice, the subsequent chapters feature textual analyses of each author’s main historical fiction works, supporting the reading of the texts with theoretical readings, including the micro-history of Carlo Ginzburg, the écriture féminine of Hélène Cixous, the abjection theory of Julia Kristeva, the theoretical propositions on “experience” by Joan Wallach Scott and Teresa De Lauretis, and the theory of gender as performance proposed by Judith Butler. The analyses underline the importance of the authors’ distinct feminine perspective over Sicilian history and ultimately suggest that the three writers represent significant examples of a “nomadic writing” to be placed outside the Sicilian male literary tradition.

‘Close as a kiss’: Gyn/Affection in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

Margaret Atwood’s novella The Penelopiad (2005) seemingly celebrates Penelope’s agency in opposition to Homer’s myth in The Odyssey. However, the twelve murdered maids steal the book to suggest the possibility of what Janice Raymond calls gyn/affection, a female bonding based on the logic of emotion that, in Atwood’s revision, verges on Kristevan abjection, the sinister and the fantastic, and serves a cathartic effect not only in the maids but also in the reader. This essay aims to question the generally accepted empowerment of Atwood’s Penelope and celebrates the murdered maids as the locus of emotion, where marginal aspects of gender and class merge to weave a powerful metaphorical tapestry of popular and traditionally feminized literary genres that, in plunging into and embracing the semiotic realm, ultimately solidify into an eclectic but compact alternative tradition of women’s writing and myth-making.

Travestismos e intertextualidades em Orlando de Virginia Woolf e na obra homónima de Sally Potter

Dissertação de mest., Literatura Comparada, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade do Algarve, 2005

Radical interiors: Cindy Sherman's ‘Sex pictures’ and Kathy Acker's 'My mother: demonology'

In 1989, the American visual artist Cindy Sherman produced her ‘Sex Pictures’, a number of photographic images of two medical mannequins whose bodies had been dismembered and reconstructed to form abstract configurations that alluded to pornographic poses. Sherman's series was a response to the National Endowment for the Arts controversy, in which American artists such as Andres Serrano and the late Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work was considered obscene by the Republican Congress, were censored. Many artists in the culture-war period had their grants rescinded. The American avant-garde writer Kathy Acker published My Mother: Demonology in 1993. A prominent concern of Acker's in the work is what she termed her ‘writing freedom’ in a climate of cultural expurgation by the Republican elite. In particular, Acker was worried that she was ‘internalizing certain censorships’. This article addresses Sherman's and Acker's work in a comparative context to explore, through the theoretical work of Julia Kristeva, the ways in which their responses to a climate of political censorship can be read as forms of intimate revolt. Kristeva's notion of ejection—the act of placing something beyond the scope of the possible—transpires as ‘a condition of art's creation’ in Sherman's and Acker's work. Acker and Sherman use the pornographic reference in their work to disrupt and dislocate the narrative and image from convention in order to de-eroticize the body, against heteronormativity's terms, and empower the female sex organs. Eversion—that is, in Sherman's and Acker's works, the act of turning the institutional and maternal body inside out—emerges as a mode of resistance to the danger of the writer and the artist internalizing cultural restrictions. The everted body creates a site of radical interiority which becomes the (impossible) site for the radical (re-)embodiment of the feminine subject.

Lier les présents aux absents : regards sur la condition d’exilé dans les littératures libano-québécoise et arabe contemporaine

Les paramètres de l’exil, comme déplacement, se transforment aujourd’hui dans un contexte de mondialisation, interrogeant le rôle des nations alors que les sociétés impliquent de plus en plus de mobilité et de diversité culturelle. Cette condition d’exilé aux repères mouvants, inscrite dans une temporalité discontinue et dont l’expérience est toujours douloureuse, a donné lieu à une littérature prolifique dans le domaine des études littéraires au cours du 20e siècle. En quoi le 21e propose-t-il un regard différent sur cette condition ? Dans ce mémoire nous analyserons quatre œuvres contemporaines qui nous proposent différentes variations des transformations identitaires profondes qui caractérisent la condition d’exilé. Deux des grands axes autour desquels s’est articulée la condition d’exilé ont été développés par Edward Said, qui propose une posture critique et politique, et Julia Kristeva, qui présente l’exil comme une condition plutôt psychique. Suivant cette perspective analytique, l’autobiographie de Mourid Barghouti fait écho à la compréhension de l’exil telle que l’entend Said, en pleine autonomie instauratrice. Puis, le roman de Rawi Hage dans une expérience plus psychique de l’exil, plus traumatique et plus violente du vécu avant l’exil, suggère que le rapport avec le milieu environnant a un impact sur l’expérience de l’exil, alors que dans ce cas il reste dysfonctionnel, et qu’un rapport pathologique à l’existence peut ensuite se manifester. Ensuite, le roman d’Abla Farhoud expose la possibilité d’un dépassement de cette expérience pathologique de l’exil par la distance, celle de l’âge et de la prise de parole. Finalement, dans la pièce Incendies de Mouawad, l’expérience psychique de l’exil est dépassée à la fois par une traduction de l’indicible de la violence, par un retour sur les traumas précédant l’exil, et par un travail collectif – comme autres formes de distances. Cette dernière œuvre est donc porteuse d’une compréhension de l’exil impliquant une dimension psychique, tout en devenant critique et politique, telle que le révèlent les écrits de Jacques Rancière. À la lumière de ces analyses, la condition d’exilé réclame d’urgence un retour sur les traumas précédents, le trauma qu’est l’exil, afin qu’une autonomie, une créativité et un engagement s’en dégagent, dans une société, dans un monde plus grand que soi. Pour les trois derniers auteurs, c’est la société québécoise qui révèle à la fois une compréhension des problématiques majeures de la condition d’exilé et une ouverture face à celles-ci, en ce début de 21e siècle.

Rethinking 'Inside the Visible'

This essay appears in the first book to examine feminist curatorship in the last 40 years. It undertakes an extended reading of Cathy de Zegher's influential exhibition, Inside the Visible, An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art. In, of and From the Feminine (1995) which proposed that modern art should be understood through cyclical shifts involving the constant reinvention of artistic method and identified four key moments in 20th century history to structure its project. The essay analyses Inside the Visible's concept of an elliptical traverse to raise questions about repetitions and recurrences in feminist exhibitions of the early 1980s, the mid 1990s and 2007 asking whether and in what ways questions of feminist curating have been continuously repeated and reinvented. The essay argues that Inside the Visible was a key project in second wave feminism and exemplified debates about women's time, first theorised by Julia Kristeva. It concludes, however, that 'women's time' has had its moment, and new conceptions of feminism and its history are needed if feminist curating is not endlessly to recycle its past. The essay informs a wider collaborative project on the sexual politics of violence, feminism and contemporary art, in collaboration with Edinburgh and one of the editors of this collection.

Estudio intertextual en dos cuentos de Borges : Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote y La biblioteca de Babel

This studyfocuses on the theory of intertextuality and on the most important approachesof Julia Kristeva, Gerard Genette and Ronald Barthestothis theory. It also examines the intertextual relationships in twoworksof Jorge Luis Borges:Pierre Menard, author of the Quixoteand The library of Babel. This studyconcludes that intertextual relations and issues are very often used in the works of Jorge Luis Borges. Analysis of histwoworks has shown the most obvious indicators of intertextuality such as allusions, quotations and references.

Abject jurisdictions : CSI: Miami, globalisation and the body politic

This article argues that CSI: Miami disseminates two versions of politics, one of which replicates the conservative suppression of political debate in America post 9/11, and the other being founded in an understanding of the body as transgressive site of political activism. This second version of politics emerges out of Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection as a confusion of borders, which unsettles equally the discreteness of identity and the sense of order that subtends conservative politics. CSI: Miami can be multiply interrogated employing Kristeva's theory because the city it portrays, as well as the bodies inhabiting it, are both natured by an abject problematisation of borders. This paper explores the specifics of the portrayal of bodies in CSI: Miami, to suggest that abjection operates at the level both of discrete bodies and of the social domain of globalisation. In CSI: Miami, the political body becomes the body politic.

Kristevan aesthetics, performativity and the production of situated knowledge

In this paper, I will draw on the work of Julia Kristeva to argue that performativity can be understood in terms of a materialist ontology that underpins creative production and the knowing subject. To understand this, we need to examine the relationship between individual history, biology and culture and processes through which creative practice attributes value by translating psychic representations of affect and drive into verbal and visual signs. Kristeva's aesthetics does not plunge us into an obscure metaphysics, but provides a model for articulating material-discursive practices that emerge from corporeal responses. Enactments, predicated by desire give rise to agency and judgement allowing practice to test theory through the production of situated knowledge.

Kristeva's psychoanalytical position reveals the necessity of linking material and individual practices of art with the social through language and interpretation. Material-discursive practices can only acquire meaning through their relationship between the speaking subject and addressees. Art itself provides us with the means for discovering the knowledge it produces. In and through material practice, the work of art is capable of transferring back to the artist as viewer, structures of meaning that have hitherto been hidden. In practice, this involves a constant movement between the biological self (the self as 'other') and the social self, the ego. In artistic research, it can be said that the first addressee is the artist her/himself, as social other. Constant movement between the two in creative practice can thus be understood as a performative production of knowledge.

Exploratory surgery of the female psyche

The thesis explores the visual narrative concerning a journey of empowerment for women. To enable the journey to advance the inquiry is directed into two areas. The first area is female gender, which is argued to be socially constructed and implicit in the marginalisation of women in western society. The second area is ‘feminine authority’, which is gained by developing an understanding and acceptance of the characteristics which have historically been considered as belonging to the feminine. Granting these characteristics agency would recognise their authority and assist in the elevation of the female to a position of equality in western society. Beginning from a feminist position, the research supported the belief that the female is marginalised in western society. It also confirmed the notion that empowerment and authority can be attained by women if they actively pursue the following; • Explore their own psychology beyond the existing socially constructed gender roles. • Develop an understanding of their feminine self by applying Jung's theories on individuation and archetypes. • Expose the underlying patriarchal influence in western epistemology and science by challenging existing deeply held cultural and scientific beliefs and by actively contributing as feminists to the areas of epistemology and science. Archetypal myths of the ‘feminine’ have developed from an androcentric position. They enforce and perpetuate gender imbalance which contributes to the disenfranchisement of women in western society, ‘Individuation’ is a process in which a person explores aspects of themselves to bring forth parts of their unconscious into their conscious mind in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of themselves. As a consequence the consciousness develops closer links with archetypal memories which assists the exploration. The ‘true feminine’ is the feminine not restricted or defined by the dominant androcentric view. Knowledge of the feminine empowers women to address the marginalisation of the female in western society and assists in the process of gaining female authority. This enquiry also investigated the four stages of female psychological development with regard to patriarchal influences. Of particular importance is the second stage of psychological development where the female identifies with historically perceived inferior characteristics of the female. This is when she rejects her connections with the primacy of female power and her deep connections with nature which were inherited from archaic times. It is at this stage that she absorbs the myths associated with western patriarchal society which effectively disempower her. Western epistemology, with its emphasis on ‘objective’ investigation and empiricism contributes to the support for and promotion of ‘inferior’ female gender. This type of investigation is brought into question when areas of research into primates and human evolutionary theory is shown to develop from an androcentric view. Western knowledge has associations with power and justice and power is commonly associated with dominance. Regard for ‘truth’ and ‘absolute’ can be viewed as key elements in the support for knowledge and its associations with power. Knowledge has historically maintained suppression of individual experience which promotes a universalised account. This suppression of beliefs other than the dominant authority maintains the existing dominant social structure. Foucault's view of the genderised or inscribed body alerts us to areas where dominance, resistance and power play a part in maximising masculine power and control. Gender becomes an instrument of power within the existing patriarchal structure. Gender, knowledge and power are identified as areas obstructing female empowerment. Part 3 of this exegesis examines the imagery which embodies the visual narrative. Particularly, the harlequin image, its historical background and connections with ancient mythology including reference to Jungian psychology. The harlequin image is developed sequentially in the earlier black and white drawings on paper. These drawings contained a female figure which was often placed in juxtaposition with a Venus or goddess image, reference was also made to ‘eve’ and the ‘siren’. These elements provided the framework which enabled the harlequin image to emerge and evolve. The narrative developed with an understanding of the ‘feminine’ aspects of the psyche which resulted in the harlequin acquiring the elevated authority of a goddess. The Harlequin evolved from my need for symbolic representation of the female psyche. It represents contradiction and dualism. It is a composition of opposites, reflects masculine and feminine traits, the dark and light of the conscious and unconscious mind, it houses both comic and sinister elements, is a trickster and menace. The costume, colours and patterns are expressive elements conducive to fragmentation and layering within the composition of the paintings. Jung examined the harlequin in Picasso's paintings. He concluded that as Picasso drew on his inner experiences the harlequin became important as a symbol; it was a pictorial representation from the unconscious psyche. It travelled freely from the conscious to the unconscious and represented the masculine and feminine, chthonian and apollonian. The final painting in the series, a triptych, completes the narrative and stands alone as a salutatory work. It unites the series by combining existing compositional devices and technique while making reference to imagery from previous works, ‘The Three Graces Victorious’, expresses the authority of the feminine. It completes a victorious stage of a journey where the harlequin is empowered by archaic memories and knowledge of the psyche. The feminine is hailed, elevated and venerated. Other elements which assist in expressing the visual narrative are; colour, technique and influence. Colour is explored and its use as an emotive devise in expressionism. Paul Klee's writing on the use of colour and it's symbolic meaning and Julia Kristeva's investigation on colour from a psychoanalytic and semiotic view are also discussed. To indicate influences and connections within my oeuvre, reference is also made to the following: Jasper Johns' for his use of imagery in his ‘Four Seasons’ series with it's reference to a journey of maturation and Louise Bourgeois' work which deals with issues of gender, memories and past journeys. Although ‘The Three Graces Victorious’; the concluding painting for the investigation is celebratory and represents a finality to the thesis, it points to further areas that impede feminine development and need future examination. Reference is made to a continuation of the exploratory journey by plotting the Harlequin/Goddesses future directions. Although the Harlequin/Goddess is empowered with newly acquired authority, her future journey does not need to be bound by mathematics or limited by rationality. She does not require power to dominate or gender structures to subjugate, but requires limitless boundaries and contexts. The Harlequin/Goddess's future journey is not fixed.

The aesthetic image : affect and the production of knowledge in practice-led research

This paper addresses the question of how we might provide practitioners with a framework for understanding how affect and aesthetic processes generate images that are implicated in the production of new knowledge in creative arts research. Drawing on the thought of Julia Kristeva, it examines the aesthetic underpinnings of discovery and the significance of this for research training and the development of more effective pedagogies both within and beyond the university.

Aesthetic experience and innovation in practice–led research

Within the context of ERA, this paper addresses the question of how we might provide practitioners with a framework for understanding creative arts research as the production of new knowledge. Drawing on the thought of Julia Kristeva, it examines the aesthetic underpinnings of discovery and the implications and significance of this for research training and the development of more effective pedagogies both within and beyond the university.
Kristeva’s work constitutes both an implicit and explicit critique of science allowing us to conceive of artistic research as an experiential and performative production of knowledge. As a mode of enquiry, artistic practice reveals the inextricable and necessary relationship between practice and theory, interpretation and making, art and life. This interrelationship underpins the aesthetic dimension of revolutionary practice and its production of unfamiliar or mutant forms of knowledge that is often difficult to grasp in terms of its capacity to engender social change and innovation. In the context of creative arts practice as research, the notion of experience-in-practice indicates that interpretation and analysis must fall to the practitioner-researcher, himself or herself, rather than to another person who has been external to the procedures of making, to trace the significant experiential, subjective and emergent processes involved in the production of the work that allows it to reveal the new. This is necessary if the generative and revolutionary impact of artistic research is to be fully understood in the wider research arena. In the final part of this paper, I will apply and illustrate these ideas through an analysis of a number of artistic research projects successfully completed in Australia.