1,721,185 research outputs found
“I shudder that I exist”. Hadewijch’s Mystical Writings as a Wayward Precursor of Autotheoretical Life-Writing
No full textThe work of Hadewijch, a thirteenth-century Beguine, explores the reflective potential of intimate affective experiences by making deliberate use of literary and religious intertexts. The writings of women mystics like Hadewijch present an understudied current in the genealogy of life-writing, yet they resonate strongly with contemporary autotheoretical practices that combine theory and art with autobiography. At the same time, the fact that Hadewijch is not a contemporary author can offer a critical perspective on the genre of autotheory itsel
The perverse art of reading: on the phantasmatic semiology in Roland Barthes' Cours au Collège de France
No full text‘I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy’. This provoking remark was the starting point of the four lecture courses Roland Barthes taught as professor of literary semiology at the Collège de France. In these last years of his life, Barthes developed a perverse reading theory in which the demonic stupidity of the fantasy becomes an active force in the creation of new ways of thinking and feeling.
The perverse art of reading offers the first extensive monograph on these lecture courses. The first part examines the psychoanalytical and philosophical intertexts of Barthes’ ‘active semiology’, while the second part discusses his growing attention for the intimate, bodily involvement in the act of reading. Subsequently, this study shows how Barthes’ phantasmatic reading strategy radically reviews the notions of space, detail and the untimely in fiction, as well as the figure of the author and his own role as a teacher. It becomes clear that the interest of Barthes’ lecture courses goes well beyond semiology and literary criticism, searching the answer to the ethical question par excellence: how to become what one is, how to live a good life
‘Brasilia Is Blood on a Tennis Court’: Julia Kristeva’s ‘Semiotic’ and the Embodied Metaphors of Lispector
No full textIn this article, I want to argue that literature can function as a supplementary form of knowledge in architecture criticism. The phenomenology of architecture often uses literature as an ideal instrument to gain knowledge about the built environment, revealing the subtleties of architectural memories, sensations and affects. However, Julia Kristeva’s take on literature provides a more radical interpretation of the literary experience as a limit-experience. Kristeva’s notion of the ‘semiotic’ allows for a use of literature that critically rethinks the phenomenological relation between the body and architectural structures. It also allows to explore other, more associative ways of writing about architecture. I will discuss Clarice Lispector’s literary, experimental and embodied account of Brasilia as a possible inspiration for such an approach. I will focus on the metaphor as a way in which the semiotic can express itself in literary language, challenging fixed interpretations and connecting different fields of perception and affection
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