شیده احمدزاده هروی

Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories have been studied more or less as expressing the cultural conflicts and problems of living in a host land. However, this study hopes to open new horizons in studying works of Lahiri from a new point of view – that of trauma and traumatic studies, with the special focus on works of Cathy Caruth. Traditionally defined as the wounds to the body of a person in an event, the word trauma has come to be related with the mental problems resulting from being a participant in the events which happen so suddenly that the person would not have enough time to understand it. Cathy Caruth, following the ideas of Sigmund Freud, attributes the shock experienced by the people in a traumatic event to the fact that the people do not have an access to the reality of trauma, which necessitates its recurrence which would provide an opportunity for the same person to experience it again. This paper intends to have a view on the short story “A Temporary Matter” by Lahiri from the viewpoint of the trauma studies. It will clarify how the ideas expressed by Caruth and similar critics can be detected so well in this story – ideas such as the unconscious and incomplete meeting of the trauma by the people going through it and that in order to overcome the following problems and restless feelings, it would necessary for having the trauma re-experienced by the same person.

In Shakespeare’s portrayal of madness, mind and body are not considered as binary opposites; on the contrary, they appear to be closely intertwined. A number of the most memorable characters in Shakespeare’s dramatic works suffer from mental disorders. A study of these characters’ mental problems on the basis of new psychological perspectives reveals that many of their mental obsessions and anxieties result from considerations pertaining to body. The interrelation between psyche and soma is most clearly discernible in the process of subjectivity in the course of which speaking subjects have to demarcate the territory of their independent and autonomous self primarily through separation from the maternal body and by constructing an independent, clean and proper body of their own. Such a body has a clear territory and exact borderlines. Besides, it has a distinct sexual identity. The subject’s effort to construct such an image of his/her body is not merely a personal and private matter. It is influenced by social, cultural, and biological standards since the subject tries to harmonize this image with these norms. Therefore, body in this sense is not just a material or biological entity; it turns out to be a social and cultural issue. The present study is an attempt to analyze the interrelationship between psychological tensions and corporeal considerations in the male subject’s psyche through studying the mental obsessions of Hamlet, as one of the most outstanding of Shakespeare’s mentally disturbed characters. To fulfill this purpose, some of his inner conflicts are analyzed in the light of Julia Kristeva’s theories regarding abjection, confrontation with the abject and the role of these procedures in the formation of subjectivity in order to gain a better understanding of the latent causes of Hamlet’s psychic trauma’s and mental disturbances. Viewed from this perspective, it is revealed that anxieties and concerns about the body of the masculine subject and cultural measures for the sexual identity of the male sex are at work behind the symptoms of Hamlet’s madness. The psychological crisis which Hamlet has to deal with after his father’s death has got several dimensions some of which will be analyzed in this research in reference to Kristeva’s notion of abjection. In this regard, Hamlet’s desperate battle to reassert his male identity, his quest to restore purity and purge himself and the whole world from corruption, as well as his hatred and fear of female body and sexual desire as a source of contamination and a serious threat to his manhood are most significant. In addition to the effeminizing effect of the female heterosexual love and the contaminating contact with the female body, the female kind’s power of regeneration terrifies Hamlet as well. All these features contribute to Hamlet’s identifying the female body as abject and lead to his repudiation of any attachment to it. Thus, it is possible to explain why Hamlet dedicates himself wholly to the sacred mission of revenge and solidifies homosocial bonds with his male companions since through these strategies, he believes he can confirm his autonomy and independence as a masculine subject and secure the territories of his clean and proper body.

Madness and its manifestations have long been one of the themes treated and diversely depicted in literary works. Shakespeare is among the many authors who have represented this phenomenon in a number of his tragedies through the creation and introduction of a few complicated outstanding characters. His treatment of this issue, according to many critics, is innovative and far from conventional and traditional notions; thus this phenomenon and those who are affected by it can be viewed and analyzed in the light of contemporary theories. Shakespeare particularly creates a peculiar language for the insane personages, which reflects their state of mind and becomes their common feature. In this article, the discourse of four such characters in three major Shakespearean tragedies – Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth – will be discussed in the light of Julia Kristeva’s linguistic theories regarding the semiotic and symbolic dispositions with the assumption that the discourse of madness in these plays is an outcome of the emergence of semiotic features in the symbolic disposition.

The tradition of suffering and fragmented body (body-in-ordeal) is followed, yet rectified, by Richard Foreman through his firm belief in the possibilities of bestowing the body with creation and reconstruction. Body should be seen as the potential site for phenomenological enactment with the surrounding world as a response to the biopolitical overactualization. In reaction to the imposed cultural forms on the body, this article tries to offer a poetics of (dis) embodiment on Foreman’s stage in dialogue with Giorgio Agamben’s meanswithout- ends pillar of thought and experience, which is the “gesture.” Body is rewritten by Foreman in order to reconcile with new forms of embodiment or gesturality. Gesture enspheres the critique of the forms of embodiment that are either installed by the power or modified by the subjects. The performers’ silence with their pure bodily existence and the voices without bodily presence reveal Agamben’s gesture. Another facet of mediality and without-means-ness emerges with Foreman’s cinematic techniques that expose his own body to multiple distortions such as close-ups through which he questions his authority as both the director and the actor. Foreman disintegrates the body into a flesh stripped of all its cultural robes and, therefore, manifesting its being-in-theprocess and potentiality.