Abstract:In recent years, the theme of bodily fragmentation has received much attention in academic studies in Europe. The body and its parts have come to be viewed as text, trope, or metaphor, allowing one to think of the social systems. Based on contemporary reflections dealing with the body as text or discourse, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Stefanie Wenner, and Jacques Lacan, the current article revisits Empedocles and Plutarch to discuss particularly the anthropological and philosophical aspects of the concepts that … Show more
“…Rainer Guldin's adoption of Mikhail Bakhtin's image of the carnivalesque body is insightful here, in which the body politic is turned upside down, symbolizing a rejection of the political and ideological hegemony of the ruling classes: "Radical social change is expressed in the imagery of broken corporeal unity." 31 Rather than a dis-eased or blinded/half-sighted body being universally linked with negativity, the dismembered body takes on more dissident metaphorical dimensions. The stable semiotic world in which the abled, touch-able, and sighted body represents power and position is upturned.…”
Section: Dismemberment and Transgressive Re-figuring Of Disability Metaphorsmentioning
The use of leprosy and blindness metaphors in the Gospels tends to stigmatize individuals as other. Untouchability was associated with social death and sight with the navigation of both material and moral terrain. Though the majority of disease and disability metaphors in the Gospels fall within this category, there are some exceptions that subvert the normative (abled) perspective. These exceptions provide promising spaces for disability advocates to challenge ableist links between disease, disability, and malevolence, and to imagine counter-narratives in which disease and disability represent more positive themes and identities.
“…Rainer Guldin's adoption of Mikhail Bakhtin's image of the carnivalesque body is insightful here, in which the body politic is turned upside down, symbolizing a rejection of the political and ideological hegemony of the ruling classes: "Radical social change is expressed in the imagery of broken corporeal unity." 31 Rather than a dis-eased or blinded/half-sighted body being universally linked with negativity, the dismembered body takes on more dissident metaphorical dimensions. The stable semiotic world in which the abled, touch-able, and sighted body represents power and position is upturned.…”
Section: Dismemberment and Transgressive Re-figuring Of Disability Metaphorsmentioning
The use of leprosy and blindness metaphors in the Gospels tends to stigmatize individuals as other. Untouchability was associated with social death and sight with the navigation of both material and moral terrain. Though the majority of disease and disability metaphors in the Gospels fall within this category, there are some exceptions that subvert the normative (abled) perspective. These exceptions provide promising spaces for disability advocates to challenge ableist links between disease, disability, and malevolence, and to imagine counter-narratives in which disease and disability represent more positive themes and identities.
“…Barker seems to partake in the theory which views fragmentation not as a sign of a discarded whole but as revealing the importance of each unit of the body. In the article "The dismembered body: Bodily fragmentation as a metaphor for political renewal", Guldin (2002) rightly recalls Bakhtin's approach to the grotesque and the organic metaphor of late medieval society:…”
The article aims at deciphering Clive Barker's multilayered short story "The Body Politic" inserted in the 4th book of Books of Blood (1984-1985). In this work, the British author presents the human body as literally a book which has to be opened, rediscovered; it is a terra incognita marked by the resurgence of repressed elements or by the sense of urgency of applying a new significance to this locus. The notion of rewriting is a leitmotiv in "The Body Politic" as Barker seems to redefine not merely the organic political metaphor but drapes this imagery with Gothic, biblical or psychoanalytic veils. Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror (1982) is a cornerstone to apprehend the depiction of the body as the ultimate unknown. The narrative traps the reader into the paradoxical hypnotic delights of the Otherized, abjectified body.
“…Kappeler (1986) concerns the word and the image representation of women in pornographic literature and visual arts and argues that women in pornography are being deprived from their subjective being and reduced into objects. Such a negative perspective is challenged in Guldin (2002) who argues that fragmentation does not cause unity loss, rather accentuates the individuals' characters and the importance of each of their organs "in which specific aspects of culture are imagined to reside" (pp. .…”
This paper examines the fragmentation of the fe/male characters in a one-novel corpus (henceforth, FFFS Corpus). The text is Final Flight From Sanaa, a Yemeni novel written by Qais Ghanem and published in 2011. The paper unfolds how the fe/male characters are introduced and talked about as anatomical parts in order to describe differences or similarities in gender representation, and to explore power relations and cultural differences between the eastern and western men and women. The analysis is done qualitatively using the feminist stylistic approach set out in Mills (1995) and quantitatively with the help of the corpus linguistic tool Wmatrix. Results have demonstrated that although the female and male bodies are almost equally fragmented, they are depicted differently. For example, female characters are introduced in terms of their physical attractiveness and sexuality while their male counterparts are focalized via their colors, physical deficiencies, skills, personality traits and the level of power they possess (whether physical or social).
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