Résultats de recherche

Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Cuerpos poéticos de un océano a otro: Cristina Peri Rossi, Ana Rossetti (hispanas); Denise Desautels y Louise Dupré (quebequesas)

Marina López Martínez

Langue: ES | Date de publication: 27-01-2021 | Résumé | p. 90-99

The body is a way of being in the world and to contemplate it. The body limits, interacts and enjoys while gender captivates and creates. Geography confines, epoch determines and circumstances may be decisive. The work exposes such aspects in the poetry of four women who belong to the same generation, but to different geographic areas. More specifically, it shows writing as a projection of the woman; the body as lyrical subject and object and hand as part and symbol of the fullness and the collapse of corporeality, especially female corporeality. The topics dealt with in the paper will be, on the one hand, how the body inhabits the world and what its relationship with the writing is, and on the other hand, the study will analyze the hand as a metonymy of the female body and the changes due to the passing of time.

2021-01-27



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Corpo femminile come strumento d’indagine nel romanzo Acciaio di Silvia Avallone

Małgorzata Puto

Langue: IT | Date de publication: | Résumé

Body Image as the Way to Express Femminity Acciaio by Silvia Avallone

The analyzed text puts a great emphasis on the human as physical beings in a physical world, in which body image is a meaningful and conscious way to express identity. The female identity includes concepts of self-esteem, self-perception, sexuality and social role and it can be challenging for a number of reasons. Body image can be a powerful way to fulfill the social expectations but it can also be very vulnerable because appearances change so much and cultural messages that fuel dissatisfaction can be very strong. Having a beautiful body can easily be linked to the concepts of success, sexuality, great expectations. Having ugly body can lead to emargination and struggling against the world that from the ancient times promotes the value of beauty in female.

Key words: body-conscious, identity, evolution, postmodernism.




Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Girlhood, Disability, and Liminality in Barbara Gowdy’s Mister Sandman

Anna Czarnowus

Langue: EN | Date de publication: | Résumé

Barbara Gowdy’s 1996 novel Mister Sandman centers on the mysteriously silent figure of Joan Cannary, a mentally disabled child who yet does not become a spectacle of the grotesque in the mode quite standard for representations of the disabled female figures, as Rosemarie Garland Thomson noticed in her magisterial study Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. In her disability Gowdy’s Joan does not constitute a metaphor of the condition of her family, either, despite the transgressions they are prone to devote themselves to. The novel offers an open-minded outlook on transgression as a means of liberating oneself from the social constraints and from the self-imposed limitations. Joan’s eternal girlhood makes her a lens for the family members’ tendency to transgress against the norms, which is ultimately received with affirmation. Her figure offers a valuable commentary on other texts by Gowdy, which present a discourse on the liminality of human body and on the boundaries of identity.


Key words: Barbara Gowdy, Canadian novel in English, disability, body, gender.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Representaciones y consumo del cuerpo femenino negro en la poesía negrista antillana

Agnieszka Flisek

Langue: ES | Date de publication: 27-01-2021 | Résumé | p. 33-47

In Cuban and Puerto Rican negrista poetry (no matter what ethnicity the author is to be ascribed to) the black or mulatto females are depicted uniquely in accordance to their external
attributes. Works by Nicolás Guillén and Luis Palés Matos draw attention to their fractured beauty and the artificiality of their body, which tends to acquire purposes the white body (the vehicle
for reason) lacks, namely, that of augmented sexuality. In this meaning, their bodies represent the desired ones. Nonetheless, the configuration of racial identity through physique implies that the female subject is severed from its specific historical circumstances: the black or mulatto female body serves as the national symbol. The picturesqueness of African origin, which these females
incarnate, invokes untamed and savage sensuality, hints at its ludic and festive nature (Jáuregui, 2008), and furthermore replaces and suppresses the harsh reality of a subject exploited by agroindustry and (neo)colonial sugar companies that operated within the area. In other words, such depiction disguises the fact that they are only labour bodies. From the perspective of such sexualized and racialized portrayal of female corporeality, the aim of the paper is to answer Hélène Cixous’s dilemma: “Where is she?”

2021-01-27



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Sexual Politics: Mapping the Body in Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant

Richard J. Gray II

Langue: EN | Date de publication: | Résumé

In L’Amant (1984), through the juxtaposition of traditional male/female sexual roles, Marguerite Duras painted a gynocentric portrait of sexual politics. By depicting a series of encounters in diverse parts of the Indochinese (Vietnam) landscape, Duras’s novel described the sexual “coming of age” story of her female protagonist’s. Each Vietnamese setting became a visual and sensory metaphor for the various developmental stages of the protagonist. In this essay, I contend that Duras’s use of contrasting settings serves to “flesh out” the sexual politics conveyed in the novel. Herein, I examine the geographic locations illustrating the sexual politics of the novel, including the Mekong River signifying the female protagonist’s rite of passage, Cholon, the city where the girl experiences sexual liberation and a struggle with the established authority, the lover’s apartment where the couple consummates their relationship, and finally, France representing the land of wealth to which the protagonist will eventually return.


Key words: autobiography, Judith Butler, Cholen (Cholon), colonisation, crossing, gender, juxtaposition, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, liberation, liminal space, mapping the body, Mekong, Kate Millett, Other, post-colonial, prostitution, sexploitation, sexuality, sexual politics.

In L’Amant (1984), through the juxtaposition of traditional male/female sexual roles, Marguerite Duras painted a gynocentric portrait of sexual politics. By depicting a series of encounters in diverse parts of the Indochinese (Vietnam) landscape, Duras’s novel described the sexual “coming of age” story of her female protagonist’s. Each Vietnamese setting became a visual and sensory metaphor for the various developmental stages of the protagonist. In this essay, I contend that Duras’s use of contrasting settings serves to “flesh out” the sexual politics conveyed in the novel. Herein, I examine the geographic locations illustrating the sexual politics of the novel, including the Mekong River signifying the female protagonist’s rite of passage, Cholon, the city where the girl experiences sexual liberation and a struggle with the established authority, the lover’s apartment where the couple consummates their relationship, and finally, France representing the land of wealth to which the protagonist will eventually return.


Key words: autobiography, Judith Butler, Cholen (Cholon), colonisation, crossing, gender, juxtaposition, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, liberation, liminal space, mapping the body, Mekong, Kate Millett, Other, post-colonial, prostitution, sexploitation, sexuality, sexual politics.

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