Crossover Literature and Abjection: Geraldine McCaughrean’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The White Darkness</Emphasis>

This article provides a close reading of Geraldine McCaughrean’s award-winning novel, The White Darkness. It argues that this is a key text in the increasing debate about ‘crossover’ literature. Whereas, traditionally, adolescent books were seen to offer compensatory fantasies to the adolescent reader, McCaughrean’s text goes beyond this, exploring adolescence in deeper terms: not simply as an age-defined period but as a time when the traditional coordinates of the self are thrown into crisis, or become destabilized (as an ‘open psychic structure’, as Kristeva puts it). Adopting such a psychoanalytical approach, it is argued, we can begin to understand this book’s appeal (and others like it) to adolescent and adult alike; that is, it stages a shift from an imaginary identification with a stable self to a more realistic, albeit less secure recognition of the flimsiness of identity. The white wastes of Antarctica provide the perfect backdrop for this confrontation with the ungraspable Real.

Otherness ‘without ostracism or levelling’: towards fresh orientations to teacher foreigners in early childhood education

Abstract

This article attempts to conceptualise the notion of the foreigner in relation to immigrant early childhood teachers. Sparked by Kristeva’s challenge, to live with and as others without ostracism or levelling, it highlights tensions that arise in a juxtaposition of the Aotearoa/New Zealand early childhood curriculum document, Te Whāriki and other guidelines for cross-cultural practices, with perspectives on the foreigner and foreignness. Situated in the neoliberal sociopolitical and cultural landscape of Aotearoa/New Zealand, the analysis foregrounds and re-frames orientations towards immigrant teachers as they may play out in the early childhood realm. Kristeva’s insights into foreigners’ raw and intimate experiences provide a freeing lens to emphasise influences on and consequences of a foreigner’s otherness. While Kristeva’s challenge may be a never-ending story of a utopian future in education, its use in this analysis is intended to provoke an awareness of complex conceptualisations of foreignness and of tensions that could subvert the aim of working towards this, possibly elusive, ideal.     

Harry Potter and the Terrors of the Toilet

The Harry Potter series focuses upon the toilet as a site for heroic action and a threshold between worlds as well as a more traditional place for boys to be bullied and girls to weep. This article offers a Kristevan reading of the toilets as abject in Harry Potter, and shows how this concept helps us make sense of wider issues within the series, especially Harry’s uneasy relation to the maternal. Alice Mills is associate professor of literature and children’s literature at the University of Ballarat. She has edited two collections of scholarly essays, on the grotesque and the unspeakable, and a number of anthologies of children’s literature. Her research interests lie mainly in the psychoanalytic and Jungian interpretation of fantasy and the picture story book. Briggs, Fungus the Bogeyman Holzwarth and Erlbruch, The story of the little mole who knew it was none of his business Griffiths, The Day My Bum Went Psycho Griffiths, Zombie Bums of Uranus     

略论萧红小说中的身体在场感——以萧红小说中的生殖场景为例

萧红小说中的生殖场面,鲁迅等评论家认为它是与男性作家的审美写作规则一致的,即转喻、升华女人的身体经验,使其成为对国家、民族的象征表达,但以克里斯蒂瓦的＂卑贱＂概念重新分析生殖场面,却有着不同的意义显现,即女人的身体没有被符号化缺席在她的小说中,在场的女人的身体以卑贱为表达机制发出了自己的声音。反抗父权文明对女性自身经验的压抑,这才是萧红小说身体在场感的真正意义。     

What is protest? Feminism,psychoanalysis and methods of social change

ABSTRACT

Despite the fact that feminism has recognised psychoanalysis to be a theory with direct application to the understanding of sexism for over 50 years, the application of psychoanalytic thinking to feminist activism has yet to be significantly realised. Using the work of Julia Kristeva, sexism is described as a symptom of an intolerable situation and overt forms of activism, such as street protest, that are critiqued as making demands on their subject. The third-wave tendency for deconstruction is examined as having direct implications to a concept of psychoanalytically informed activism.     

互文性理论的形成与变异——从巴赫金到布鲁姆

互文性,亦称"文本间性",是目前文化研究中不可或缺的一个重要概念,其主旨精神在于消解权威,解放文本,释放文本的意义.然而在具体的使用过程中,"互文性"形成了更为丰富多彩的内涵,一方面显示了这一关键词对后人启发的丰富性,同时也形成了诸多不便.本文试图追根溯源,指出互文理论的贡献者及其理论观点,分析其形成和早期发展的过程,以期理清视域,方便研究.     

品特戏剧中的情人游戏

在哈罗德·品特的三部戏剧作品《回家》、《情人》和《微痛》中,家庭中的女性人物都表现出背离妻子身份的情人形象。对身份固定性的打破,使得这些品特女性成为父权体制中的不稳定因素,从内部对传统性别秩序产生了冲击。从朱丽娅·克里斯蒂娃在符号学影响下的女性理论视角进行解读,这些品特女性利用符号态的特质动摇了封闭的父权象征语言体系,为女性乃至所有个体的存在方式揭示出更多的可能性。     

An Eye for an I: Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Questions of Identity

This paper sees Neil Gaiman’s Coraline as following a darker tradition in children’s literature, most commonly found in the fairy tale. It explores some of the existential issues that concern us all: to do with identity, sex, death, ontology, evil, desire and violence. The article takes a largely psychoanalytical approach, showing how Freud’s concept of the Uncanny is particularly helpful in explaining both the text’s appeal, and its creepy uneasiness. Namely, our fears about existence and identity as separate beings: our worry that we will either not be noticed (being invisible and isolated), or we will be completely consumed by the attention of another. Lacan’s concepts of the Symbolic and the Real provide the theoretical underpinning for this reading, together with Kristeva’s notion of the abject.

法国后现代女性主义研究思想述评及其影响

20世纪60年代,在西方国家出现了以对现代性解构和否定为基本特征的后现代主义,法国女性主义在欧洲女性主义的后现代理论转向过程中做出了突出贡献。本文分析了法国女性主义后现代理论转向的思想渊源,剖析了法国后现代女性主义三大家希克苏斯、伊里格芮、克里丝蒂娃的主要思想及有关理论,并对它们作了简短的评价、预测、发展及其对我国的影响。