This article rereads J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) and its intertextual bond with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) in the framework of cognitive poetics to shed light on the complex issue of canonicity in terms of content and form/style in Foe. To this purpose, Marie-Laure Ryan's notions of textual actual world (TAW) and accessibility relations are used along with Barbara Dancygier's concept of narrative space construction to examine how Susan Barton's narrative (the postcolonial account) anchors/accesses the already consolidated TAW of Robinson Crusoe (the colonial text) to dislocate the colonizer's secluded, monologic text by superimposing another psyche, through cognitive blending, upon it. Susan's narrative incorporates her constant awareness of the social mind to assimilate – rather than push aside – the colonizer's narrative by driving it out of its monologic state toward a dialogic, multivocal exchange in the contemporary postcolonial world where Cruso(e)'s story becomes a part of Susan's story.
In Wuthering Heights, Brontë provides us with the opportunity to meet two writing subjects; Emily Brontë herself and her character Catherine Earnshaw. Both these writers resist and challenge the authority of the patriarchal. Their different methods of interaction, though, cause one to fail and the other one to succeed. The objective of this paper is to have a look at the strategies that culminate in such a result from a Kristevan viewpoint. Findings indicate how Brontë can, unlike Catherine, play successfully with ideas in the text, sublimate her desires through her metaphors and finally achieve a sense of jouissance by playing at the borders without being entrapped in the forbidden realm of the abject. In addition, it is discussed that through metaphors, Brontë simultaneously establishes and demolishes the codes of an apparently accepted patriarchal world in the symbolic territory, destabilizes the text and deconstructs the fake reform of the ending of the story while constantly remaining on the safe side.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.