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In Sa'adat Hasan Manto's short story "Toba Tek Singh", readers are introduced to Sikh inmate Bishan Singh living in an asylum in pre-Partition India.1 The disfigured, swollen, babbling body of Bishan Singh is redolent of Giorgio Agamben's representation of the " Muselmann ", the abject camp prisoners of Auschwitz, in his Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Drawing on Agamben's insights, this article reads the figure of Bishan Singh as the Agambenian " Muselmann " and Partition witness, caught in the space of the camp under the guise of an asylum for the mentally ill. This article also traces this space or holding centre for the mentally ill as a site of production of an ab-humanity marked not so much by a lack of speech, but by its provocative disorder. The figure of Bishan Singh as " Muselmann " emerges as marked out by his garbled, traumatized language that signals both his ab-humanity and his exposure to the violence that attends the making of the human subject. This study argues that Bishan Singh's wounded body and speech constitute traces of the unsayable, and that what is perceptible emerges from what is not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implementing Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, the present study attempts to demonstrate that the short fiction of Lydia Davis, contemporary American writer, is, first and foremost, about the fragility of identity and the precariousness of its borders. Using a descriptive-analytical approach and Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, as the main source in which she delineates her theory, this paper studies four of Lydia Davis's short stories in depth. Abjection is the process in which the subject casts aside anything foreign to the self, or the 'abject,' at an early stage, to safely procure a coherent I. By detecting and interpreting two of the abject's main manifestations, namely women and corpses, the current article will contend that Davis's characters/narrators are always already stuck in seemingly bottomless pits of identity crises, both inside and through their use of language. Analyzing Davis's "The Thirteenth Woman," "Suddenly Afraid," "Grammar Questions," and "Letter to a Funeral Parlor," this research tries to unravel the intricacies of maintaining shaken identities and endangered subjectivities at the face of unimaginable horror. Although discarded repeatedly by the characters in these stories, the abject never vanishes; it keeps haunting the periphery of selfhood and the solidarity of meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monstrous bodies are culturally coded, reflecting the anxieties, expectations, fears, and desires of the culture within which they are produced. This article seeks to study monstrous corporeality in an attempt to understand the interface between culture and monsters by looking at the Greek mythical monsters as represented in Natalie Haynes's novel Stone Blind (2022). By examining the embodied difference as well as the grotesque and the abject that inhabit the liminal space, we explore the corporeal otherness of monsters, the cultural cues entrenched in their non-normative bodies and their discursivity. The study, probing into the liminal nature of monstrous bodies that resist categorisation, seeks to highlight the subversive potential that deviant bodies offer and how Haynes seizes this opportunity to challenge the human penchant to monsterise difference for a re-evaluation of the cultural construction of monstrous bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article details the deconstruction of social identity in Mark Gevisser's memoir Lost and Found in Johannesburg. It does so by emphasising how the city's design reflects racial and sexual segregation through the construction of borders and boundaries that are nonetheless nebulous and artificial. In Gevisser's memoir, his recollections are interspersed with the narratives of other marginalised individuals and groups. I employ Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection to understand how systems of exclusion function not only to exclude, but paradoxically, how they allow spaces of inclusion. I argue that the apartheid city can be read as a social body that can be analysed in a similar manner to how the individual subject distinguishes itself from others. The social body therefore creates subjective boundaries between racialised and sexualised others to maintain its sense of autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A literary criticism for the book "El Techo de la Ballena: Retro-Modernity in Venezuela" by María C. Gaztambide, is presented. Topics include deliberate cultivation of slippage between imposed social limits through abject imagery and expression and the resulting political ramifications; and subversive dialogues with midcentury modernity in the visual arts production with political effects of abjection as a social-aesthetic practice with justified through claims to rationality and social advancement with cultural production.

Sepsis, septic tank, septum – these terms help to locate phantasmatic representation of waste spaces in cinema, which is here termed "septopia". Those who inhabit septopia are positioned as broken, fractured, or discarded identities. Amid COVID-19, septopia becomes more relevant to political realities, where people rebel against sanitized spaces and lockdown policies. Using Fredric Jameson's concept of the political unconscious and theorization of allegory, this article navigates how media and film can map anxieties and clashes surrounding pandemic measures. It first explains the concepts of septopia as a mode of political commentary in the 2000s post-apocalyptic movies: Wall-E, District 9, and Land of the Dead. It then explores how "septopia" and wastiality contribute to expressions of the political pandemic's unconscious, superstructurally mediating peoples' responses to lockdown. The article argues that attempting to understand why people protest against COVID measures can help avoid counterproductive responses and counter increased social abjection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the various analyses that examine Imre Kertész's Fateless, little attention has been paid to the relationship between body and narrative. Using Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject, I focus on excerpts in the novel in which power breaches the boundaries of the protagonist's body, Gyuri Köves, as he endures detainment in various concentration camps. In this paper I argue that it is the dehumanized and abjectified body that rebels against totalitarianism by refusing to accept a deceptive survival scenario. When the perspective of death has been accepted, the concept of the abject paradoxically reveals that is the identity's inherent motherly aspect that is able to provide a human perspective to an abjectified person. After comparing excerpts in Fateless and One Woman in the War by Alaine Polcz, another narrative in which violence breaks the boundaries of the body, I will reach the conclusion that the body itself forms the final frontier of dictatorship. Once totalitarian dictatorship penetrates the body, it loses its influence over the victim as death offers a more humane, more bearable life. My examination of Fateless and One Woman in the War illustrates that it is the embodied mother in us which is able to refute totalitarianism and thereby empower an abjectified existence to become an empowering experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representations of the devastation of nuclear annihilation are undoubtedly confrontational, yet crucial to understanding the ongoing trauma and impact of atomic warfare. In examining how survivors "translate into words an extraordinarily painful landscape" (Tōge 1952), this paper explores the abject imagery utilized by hibakusha poets in order to express the violent horrors of the A-bomb. It focuses on how explicitly grotesque images function to give shape to events regarded as ineffable, and to make potently real the experiences of those whose identities were defined by shame and revulsion. Drawing upon Kristevan notions of abjection, and the poetry of hibakusha such as Kurihara Sadako, Tōge Sankichi, Kawamura Sachiko, and Shōda Shinoe, it contends that by seeking to graphically confront that which is ineffable, hibakusha poets are able to contest the liminal spaces to which their bodies and experiences have been relegated; indeed, by "reopening the grave" (Gotō, qtd. in Treat 1995, 29), survivor poets refuse silence, and give form and shape to trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner tells a story of a family who undergoes a series of tragic events. In the course of the events, the physical decay of bodies and nature, reflects the decay in moral values of Bundren family and society. In this novel, everything starts and ends with a corpse: the dead body of family's mother. According to Kristeva, the border is designated by a corpse which reminds everyone the bitter smell of death. In this article William Faulkner's masterpiece As I Lay Dying has been analyzed from the point of decay in terms of Theory of Abjection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comprehensive examination of the numerous manifestations of abjection in Bernhard Schlink's The Reader. This paper argues that the recurring motifs of illness and bodily incontinence, in addition to the dual symbolic role of Hanna as a mother and a lover, establishes Germany's relationship to its Holocaust history in unquestionably abject terms. Drawing on the groundbreaking anthropological work of Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror, the Holocaust is examined in its role as a cultural taboo. Departing from previous work, the abjection in The Reader is holistically examined as it relates to the historic as well as psychological dimensions of German memorial culture. [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]

Bengali bratakathās are folk ritual tales and rhymes that women listen to and/or narrate at the time of the accomplishment of their ritual vows known as bratas (Sanskrit vratas), made for the fulfillment of worldly wishes and wants. The bratas (ritual vows) and their kathās (tales), together with chāṛās (rhymes), create a space where women apparently dominate by becoming the performers, the narrators, the transmitters, the authorities of knowledge, the agencies of socio-familial wellbeing and the protectors of moral and ideological institutions. As these tales and rhymes portray, the "female force" crucially awakening caused by foreign influences; second, the presence of a pervading Buddhist undertone throughout Kang's production, and its apparent contrast with his "Confucianist" intellectual endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a writer whose fiction is known for its transgressive themes and forms, it is no surprise that the Mexican author Ana Clavel has continued to revel in such contraventions in her novellaLas ninfas a veces sonríen(2012). In this article I seek to examine how these, also new transgressions, materialize in the novella specifically within a queer framework. The queer showcasesLas ninfas’ exploration of “outlaw” sexual desires as well as the fantastical and intertextual genre-bending. By defying heteronormative sexual normalcy, Clavel is seen to challenge certain “givens” within (Mexican) society, whether these be religious, moral, sexual, or cultural, and thus creating a fascinating representation of society’s particular fears, anxieties, and disavowed desires. In the context of the female character’s sexual experiences, transgressive queereness can be understood by making reference to various theories including those of Kristeva’s abjection/uncanny and Creed’s/Braidotti’s monstrous feminine, whereby the female is positioned in terms of an ambiguous oscillation between unthreatening object of male desire, monstrosity, and celebratory female sexual agency. Ultimately by thus delving into outlawed “no-deseos”,Las ninfascan be posited as a prime example of a Barthesian text of “jouissance” which disrupts the reader’s pleasurable reading experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marlene van Niekerk’s three novels,Triomf, AgaatandMemorandum: A Story with Paintingsshow a deliberate engagement with the abject and abjection in the Kristevan sense of the word. Kristeva examines abjection and its manifestations extensively inPowers of Horror(1982) and this text form the theoretical departure point for this analysis. Following Dovey (1988) my approach will be “drawing attention to the theoretical issues the novels articulate and to the modes of novelistic discourse with which they engage”. I will locate the traces of the abject in Van Niekerk’s novels and demonstrate to what extent the three texts under discussion reflect Kristeva’s viewpoints on abjection, the relationship with the maternal body and related themes within Kristeva’s critical project such as the boundary between the I as subject and the abject object, food loathing and the omnipresent struggle with the maternal hold over the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this essay, I develop an account of disability exclusion that, though inspired by Julia Kristeva, diverges from her account in several important ways. I first offer a brief interpretation of Kristeva's essays 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and ... Vulnerability' and 'A Tragedy and a Dream: Disability Revisited' and, using this interpretation, I assess certain criticisms of Kristeva's position made by Jan Grue in his 'Rhetorics of Difference: Julia Kristeva and Disability.' I then argue that Kristeva's concept of abjection, especially as developed by Sara Ahmed and Tina Chanter, offers important insights into disability oppression; Ahmed's and Chanter's contributions improve upon Kristeva's account. Understanding disability as abject helps to explain both resistances to interacting with disabled others and ways to resist disability oppression. Finally, I argue that understanding disability as abject is preferable to recent deployments of Lacanian theory in disability studies and that this account is compatible with social models of disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both Sarah Kane's Blasted and Helen Oyeyemi's Juniper's Whitening have frightening instances of theatrical violence which include infanticide. These instances are more overt in Blasted and are alluded to in Juniper's Whitening. This article interrogates the instances of infanticide within both plays, connecting the violence to the child abuse and farcical infanticide in The Punch and Judy Show. The figure of the child is examined from the perspective of a symbol of civilisation corrupted from within and the murder of the child through the lens of Kristeva's theory of abjection. The staged infanticide and the rapes present in both texts reflect shifting cultural norms in an increasingly multicultural Britain. The study of these two plays is both literary and dramaturgical; the casual brutality in Kane's play with the psychological and insidious motifs in Oyeyemi's work are compared with the motifs found in The Punch and Judy Show and then situated within the context of the In-yerface theatre productions of the 1990s to the 2000s. In both plays, a sense of domesticity being a farce underscoring brutality, torture and infanticide is present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being identified with the imaginary father to separate from the abject mother, Pearl in The Scarlet Letter is finally able to construct her subject. This paper takes an excursion into Kristevan exploration of how Pearl's subjectivity develops. It also reveals and analyzes Pearl's bewilderment and dilemma in the process of her subject construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with the discourse of food and eating especially as related to the representation of the abject eating-disordered body. I will be particularly interested in the gothic representation of the anorexic and bulimic body in samples of medical advice literature and NHS websites and how they reinforce popular myths about anorexia by imagining the eating disordered body as a fixed object of abjection. Focusing on the use of gothic devices, tropes and narrative structure, these imaginations will be read against alternative representations of anorexic/bulimic bodies in autobiographical illness narratives, fictional accounts and a psychoanalytical case history in order to explore how gothic discourses can help opening up new understandings and conceptions of illness, healing and corporeality in the dialogue between medical staff and patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents literary criticism of several books by Jim Carroll, including "The Petting Zoo," "The Basketball Diaries," and "Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries". It references the concept of the abject as developed by philosopher Julia Kristeva. Particular focus is given to Carroll's portrayal of heroin use. Other topics include bodily fluids, horror, and obsession.

Through the analysis of Monoceros (2011), a novel by Canadian contemporary writer Suzette Mayr, we examine the entanglement between concepts of violence and abjection in literature. Mayr presents several characters that come into contact as a result of a suicide committed by a previously bullied student of a Catholic school. With the narrative as a reference, we propose to discuss the growing violence inside the school system in contemporary times, in this case as a result of sexual intolerance. Works by Nan Stein and Melinda York, who address the imposition of too strict gender roles on female and male students as one of the causes for violent outcomes among youngsters, will be our main theoretical references. We also discuss the topic of desire and abjection, mainly developed by Kristeva and Kulzbach, as illuminating perspectives for the analysis of the selected novel. We suggest that in Monoceros bullying is performed to guarantee fixed and binary models of gender identity, which ends up by promoting low self-esteem and feelings of awkwardness on individuals defined as different from the norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the works of novelist Léon Bloy in the 19th century literature. Various elements of his works that are discussed include principles of dolorism, opaqueness seen in the literature, etymological aspect of chiliasm and deliverance. It further compares his works with works of novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. Other topics related to his works that are discussed include his personal discontent with the elements he used in the books and masochistic abjection. Comparison between his two novels including "Le Désespéré," and "La Femme pauvre," is also presented.

The article discusses the abjection in the book "Under the Volcano" by English author Malcolm Lowry. It argues that while the novel is usually read via Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of the carnivalesque, it is more appropriately read through Julia Kristeva's abjection. It demonstrates how the novel forecloses a sense of renewal and resurrection in Bakhtinian carnivalesque, but reading the text through the abject lens properly appreciates its darker, horrifying and messy elements.

The article presents literary criticism of the book "To the End of the Land" by David Grossman. Particular focus is given to the roles of the psychoanalytic concept of abjection and the Hebrew idea of temimut (uprightness) as developed by philosophers Julia Kristeva and Emmanual Lévinas, respectively, in the book. Topics discussed include Grossman's characterization of the Arab-Israeli conflict, survival, and hospitality.

A literary criticism of th neo-slave novel "The Known World" by Edward P. Jones is presented. Topics include African American slavery, intra-racial subjugation, socioeconomic status, abjection, slavery in the Bible, and racial hierarchy. Also examined are the portrayal of homosexuality, the psychopathology of slavery, and slave trade operations.

The article applies selected concepts from the writings of Julia Kristeva to the analysis of a novel by Doris Lessing entitled The Cleft. Published in 2007, The Cleft depicts the origin of sexual difference in the human species. Its emergence is fraught with anxiety and sexually specific violence, and invites comparison with the primal separation from the mother and the emancipation of the subject in process at the cost of relegating the maternal to the abject in the writings of Julia Kristeva. Lessing creates an ahistorical community of females (Clefts) from which the male community (Squirts) eventually evolves. The growing awareness of sexual difference dovetails with the emotional and intellectual development, as the nascent human subject gradually enters linear time viewed from perspective by the narrator of the novel, a Roman senator who hoards ancient manuscripts with the story of Clefts and Squirts. The article juxtaposes the ideas of Lessing and Kristeva, who have both cut themselves off from feminism, and have both been inspired by psychoanalysis. Primarily, Lessing's fictional imaginary can be adequately interpreted in light of Kristeva's concept of abjection as an element that disturbs the system. My interpretation of abjection is indebted to Pamela Sue Anderson's reading of Kristeva, notably her contention that violence as a response to sexual difference lies at the heart of collective identity. Finally, the imaginary used by Lessing and Kristeva is shown to have stemmed from the colonial imaginary like the concepts of Freud and Jung. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]