Confessional Poetics of Abjection in Women Poetry: A Comparative Analysis of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Zhai Yongming’s “Mother”

Becoming famous in 1960s,American confessional poetry,in response to High Modernism as impersonality and totalobjectivity,shifted focus on personal experience.When such confessional flow rushed into China in 1980s,it provided Chinese poets a confessional voice to write and investigate significant issues of world,life and society.Thus,writing in different languages and periods does not stop them to implement the same mission:to adopt a confessional voice,represent trauma as blackness and darkness in women experience and bring light,meanwhile,achieve one’s own truth and liberation.

Experiencing the Abject Female Body and Writing the Female Self:Body Narrative of In the Heart of the Country

In the Heart of the Country,the second novel by J.M.Coetzee,has been traditionally read as a disembodied writing that focuses on the problem of writing per se instead of the reality.This paper contends that the work is actually a body narrative that explores the visceral pain suffered by Magda whose infertile body impedes her being a qualified subject.As the heroine in a postcolonial novel,Magda is not just a body that is restricted and constructed by the politics of the body,but also a thinking and writing body that consciously questions and resists the gendered bodily norms under whose yardstick her subjecthood is barred.Written in the metafictional manner,Magda’s narrative of the body is not just a record of her corporeal experience,but also a self-conscious negotiation with,and challenge of,the bodily norms under whose yardstick her body has been debased or,in terms of Judith Butler,abjected.Taking her female bodily experience as the starting point,Magda writes a feminine text that values passion,fluidity and non-linearity to disrupt the patriarchal discourse underpinned with logical reasoning.The feminine body narrative endeavors to achieve a new way of communication through which a reciprocal cross race/gender relationship might be established.

不同方法提取驱蚊香草精油中化学成分的比较

[目的]比较不同方法提取的驱蚊香草精油的化学成分。[方法]应用GC/MS分别对2种方法提取的精油进行分离和检测。[结果]在水蒸气蒸馏法提取的精油中检测到23个成分,在有机溶剂法提取的精油中检测到49个成分;精油的主要成分为香茅醇、马兜铃烯、乙酸香茅酯、香叶醇、芳樟醇、异薄荷酮、β-波旁烯和香榧烯醇等。[结论]水蒸气蒸馏法使驱蚊香草精油化学成分大量损失,但对沸点高、相对难挥发的主要化学成分有很好地富集作用;有机溶剂提取法能很好地保留驱蚊香草精油的化学成分。

Chunibyo:A Postmodern Lacanian Symptom Happening in Abjected Adolescence

Chunibyo, a new Japanese slang term, which roughly translates to "fourteen sick", usually occurs among middle school students. Most of the"patients"are teenagers, who see themselves as grown adults and believe they have special power. According to Lacan's theory, this symptom would disappear when people enter the symbolic order. However, some remain"sick"even after they have grown up. In this essay, conceptual explanation will be given to this symptom based on the theory of"abjection",while linking Chunibyo to the epistemological process of paranoiac knowledge rooted in Lacan's psychic synthesis. Afterward,Chunibyo will be analyzed in terms of contemporaneity and spatiality. Some effective ways to treat Chunibyo will also be discussed in the last section.

Vomunt ut Edant,Edunt ut Vomant:Petronius’Satyricon and Features of Decadence and Victimhood in Sigalit Landau’s Installation“The Dining Hall”

Sigalit Landau is an international sculpture,video,installation,and performance artist,born in Jerusalem,and raised also in the USA and the UK.The infernal main space in her installation“The Dining Hall”(2007,KW Institute for Contemporary Art,Berlin)is filled with images resembling human remains engaged in riotous consumption from huge iron pots,in physical circus-like tricks,and copulation,surrounded by huge fleshy-like constructions.While the immediate association may be that of an apocalyptic catastrophe in relation to the Holocaust,the reference is multifaceted,as this study seeks to show.There is a strong connotation of corporeality,gluttony,digestion,decay,and abjection combined with licentiousness,and a proximity between death and pleasure.This multiplicity of contexts is embedded in the term décadence,in its connection with Antiquity and mostly with ancient Rome,and calls to mind the Roman Menippean 1st century CE text Satyricon by Petronius.A comparative analysis of Landau’s installation in relation to Satyricon opens up the way to a broad interpretation,revealing much topical and conceptual parallelism that reveals Landau’s engagement with a kind of decadence typical to the contemporary condition and that of Israel in particular.A prominent feature of her installation is that of victimhood and its influence on the Israeli occupation policy and conduct.Consequently,Landau’s installation is interpreted here as an allegory of a particular state of mind,reflecting both decadence and victimhood.

Poverty and Violence in Joyce Carol Oates's Fiction

Joyce Carol Oates, one of America's most prestigious and prolific contemporary writers, favors depicting the dark side of America, especially poverty and violence. This paper studies Oates' s depiction of abject poverty, of those most powerless and vulnerable and those who cannot attain the food, water, and shelter necessary for survival during the Great Depression. Then, relative poverty after the Depression is also discussed. Oates keenly observes "the invisible poor" in the affluent American society and gives voice to those relatively deprived and marginal. By analyzing the relationship between poverty and violence, this paper concludes that Oates tries to awaken readers to the social malaise and the real life of the downtrodden and at the same time calls for passion and life's energy. The obsession with the darkest sides of the society is not a sick fondness but reflects the social conscience of Oates as a serious writer.

Down in the Dump:The Abject in Alice Notley’s Culture of One

Alice Notley’s Culture of On e(2011)is a“poet’s novel”about a woman who lives in the dump of a U.S.Southwest desert town.The female character who“inhabits”the dump-and this poet’s novel-is both metonym for and guide into the lost representation of“the abject,”a concept developed by Julia Kristeva as a psychic state of horror and response to that which lies outside culturally“normalized”subjects and objects,and our“desire for meaning.”Utilizing her dump refuse for its materials,the main character,Marie,creates her own“culture of one,”standing as figure for the artist/writer plunging not“meaning”but meaninglessness and its abject association with death,which is prefigured as the unclean,the improper,rejected body parts,deviant“non-existent”personae-and,ultimately,Marie’s figural status as marginal inhabitant/“culture remaker”/older woman/multi-media“poet”artist.Without traditional conventions of novelistic character development,plot,and visual description,Notley’s“poet’s novel”formally engages in what Viktor Shkolvsky,in his well-known essay“Art as Technique,”terms“defamiliarization”or“strangeness”(“ostranenie,”in Russian),including those principles he cites of“deceleration”and“deviation of the norm.”Notley’s work twists the binary logic implied in Shkolvsky’s“deviation”versus“norm”further by revealing abjection’s“strangeness”in the poet’s novel itself as form,”a text that is always becoming its own site of the linguistic abject,never codifying identity,or the interpreted known.