Papers by Christina Kkona
Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism
Routledge, London and New York, 2021
The introduction (only) can be read, but NOT downloaded on google books. See link. Migrating Mind... more The introduction (only) can be read, but NOT downloaded on google books. See link. Migrating Minds contributes to the prominent interdisciplinary domain of Cosmopolitan Studies with twenty innovative essays by humanities scholars from all over the world that re-examine theories and practices of cosmopolitanism from a variety of perspectives. The volume satisfies the need for a stronger involvement of Comparative and World Literatures and Cultures, Translation, and Education Theories in this crucial debate, and also proposes an experimental way to explore in depth the necessity of a cosmopolitan method as well as the riches of cosmopolitan representations. The essays follow a logical progression from the situated philosophical and political foundations of the debate to interdisciplinary propositions for a pedagogy of cosmopolitanism through studies of modern and contemporary cosmopolitan cultural practices in literature and the arts and the concurrent analysis of prototypes of cosmopolitan identities. This trajectory allows readers to appreciate new historical, theoretical, aesthetic, and practical implications of cosmopolitanism that pertain to multiple genres and media, under different modes of production and reception. In the de-territorialized landscape of Migrating Minds, mental and sentimental mobility, rather than the legacy of place, is the key to an efficient, humanist response to deadening globalization.
Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 2017
Whether solitary or shared, childhood reading in the Recherche is a sacred experience, somewhere ... more Whether solitary or shared, childhood reading in the Recherche is a sacred experience, somewhere between ethics and aesthetics and, on the other hand, between nature and culture. With both the Sandian narrators and the mother of the Proustian protagonist, reading aloud flirts with censorship, as far as it is subject to a tension between sensuality and repression. The grandmother’s “aesthetics of gift”—that opens up to the historical potential of language—offers an alternative beyond binaries. As the maternal reading of François le Champi shows it, censorship is a repressive practice that produces gaps and inconsistencies, but it also stimulates the openness of the imaginary and the triggering of creativity. The tale becomes a “potential space” (Winnicott), a “play” that facilitates transiting from childhood to adolescence. This “play” invites a new understanding of literature, no longer based on easy communicability but on the expressive potential of what is incommunicable. (In French)
En opérant une distinction entre l'amour jaloux et la jalousie amoureuse qui explique l'o... more En opérant une distinction entre l'amour jaloux et la jalousie amoureuse qui explique l'oscillation du jaloux entre lucidité et crédulité, l'article explore les effets antagonistes de la jalousie et démontre comment les deux côtés se rejoignent dans l'expérience de Swann et du narrateur.
La question d'écrire encore, et comment, des fictions de soi après Marcel Proust s'est po... more La question d'écrire encore, et comment, des fictions de soi après Marcel Proust s'est posée de façon particulièrement aiguë à plusieurs écrivaines anglophones qui entrent en dialogue avec la Recherche, en citant, paraphrasant, pastichant Proust, ou en lui répondant. Virginia Woolf, Jacqueline Rose et Anne Carson, chacune à sa manière, puisent dans l'épisode d'Albertine l'inspiration pour s'interroger sur la différence féminine ou réécrire l'histoire du point de vue d'Albertine.
Nineteenth Century French Studies, Mar 22, 2012
Philosophy Today, 2012
Je vais te dire pourquoi le sacre, pour moi, c'est aussi cela, et peut-etre seulement cela: l... more Je vais te dire pourquoi le sacre, pour moi, c'est aussi cela, et peut-etre seulement cela: l'imaginaire. Le feminin et le sacre Julia Kristeva's early work La Revolution du Langage Poetique, frequently mistaken for her doctoral thesis,1 addresses from the beginning the author's epistemological project, which mainly concentrates, next to her linguistic and semiotic background, on a parallel, indeed intertwined study of literature and psychoanalysis. Kristeva's turn to psychoanalysis is conveyed by the idea that creative singularity is not accessible without resorting to the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, audible through a comprehension of language that is not limited to a code-object of linguistics but understood as a "loving discourse," actualized through the transference/ counter-transference relationship during the psychoanalytic therapeutic process.2 With the introduction of some of the major concepts in her work (chora, semiotic, thetic), Kristeva expands her interrogation to the understanding of the sacred building upon anthropological researches related to the origins of religion. In her constant dialogue with the father of psychoanalysis, Kristeva not only discusses his major ideas but also recapitulates his methodology: following Freud's example, she integrates psychoanalysis with anthropological findings, using of course a more updated corpus compared to the one used by her predecessor. Diane Jonte-Pace deserves the credit for emphasizing Kristeva's rethinking of Freud's conception of religion in Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, and Civilization and its Discontents in her works Powers of Horror, In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, and Strangers to Ourselves.3 However, the importance of religion in Kristeva's work, repeatedly emphasized, is not to be reduced to methodological premises. She subscribes from the beginning to one of the most decisive Freudian discoveries, that the origins of subjectivity, society, and culture share intrinsically the same fantasies and fears. It is on the basis of the fundamental resemblance between the infancy of the individual and the one of the human race that the question of religion arises in Kristeva's thought. Thus, a concern with the sacred can be traced in all of Kristeva's work, revealing every time the imaginary as a structural element of the psyche and the culture. This intrinsic relationship between the sacred and the imaginary leads to the ultimate question of human creativity and more precisely to the art and literature. But it comes also as a response to the secular universe of modernity which inscribes transcendence in the immanence. I believed, thus I talked It is commonplace that scholars writing on Kristeva are almost always concerned with the clarification of the author's constitutive terms, as if it were necessary to summarize her entire theoretical system in order to discuss a specific issue it addresses. However, it is true that Kristeva is not content to introduce new concepts; she also borrows and redefines notions that have previously been articulated and somewhat established, starting with the Lacanian imaginary. It is thus needed to draw the archaeology of this concept and determine its place within the Kristevan theoretical system. In the first pages of La Revolution du Langage Poetique, Kristeva advances the hypothesis that the foundation of what she calls signifiance, considered in the primitive era as the sacred, is within the capitalist system either disguised into art or condemned as schizophrenia;4 that is, the loss of the symbolic function.5 Signifiance, which includes both the semiotic and the symbolic aspects of the signifying process, is to be found in marginalized, though most frequently collective phenomena witnessing to what the "official" discourse represses: the process that goes beyond the subject and its communicative structures. …
Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 2011
http://www.fabula.org/colloques/document464.php
Résumé / Resumen / Riassunto New migratory movements are one of the processes of globalization ai... more Résumé / Resumen / Riassunto New migratory movements are one of the processes of globalization aiming to transform the organization of socio-economic relations. When immigration from the global South to the North is forced on the more vulnerable social classes, both authorities and media talk about a “refugee crisis”. The global flow of refugees constitutes one of the greatest challenges of today inasmuch as it revives identity questions. This very ‘crisis’ translates a clash with the applicability of the postmodern discourse of the other. This paper addresses questions of (im)migration, in order to examine their ethical implications. Secondly, it explores the intersection of ethics and aesthetics on a global basis by examining a cinematic work that reveals unexpected encounters, hardships and hidden possibilities of the immigration experience. Theo Angelopoulos’ Eternity and a day (1998) discloses the beauty that emerges in hardships and it rearticulates ethical questions that appe...
From the first lie, that of the hero to his mother, to the lie which marks the end of his relatio... more From the first lie, that of the hero to his mother, to the lie which marks the end of his relationship with Albertine, the tricks played by Odette with Swann, the lies of the young ladies of Montjouvain, of Charlus and Morel, everything occurs in A la Recherche as if the lie, as a language of otherness, implies generates a semantic level which escapes the liar as well as the investigator. This level is based on the double meaning of the word invention: at the same time creation and discovery. Storytelling encourages the author of the story to create what was always there, in waiting, to be discovered. The numerous resemblances between the description of certain lies of Albertine and the artists' mysterious world, suggest that it is necessary to seek in the double movement of creation/discovery the truth of art, including the art of Proust. Perhaps the proustian paradigm of the lie constitutes the best illustration of fiction in its early state and it is in this direction that th...
The elusive woman Login/Register to submit a paper for this seminar. Organizer: christina kkona... more The elusive woman Login/Register to submit a paper for this seminar. Organizer: christina kkona Co-Organizer: Sébastien Doubinsky Contact the Seminar Organizers Scholarly interest in portrayals of female errancy has mainly focused on works of previous eras, from Ariosto's women wanderers to Francisco López de Úbeda's La picara Justina (1605) to Frances Burney's The wanderer, or Female difficulties (1814). Barbara Antoniazzi's The Wayward Woman. Progressivism, Prostitution, and Performance in the United States, 1888-1917, despite its narrow scope, has the merit of being one of the rare works recasting the gender question at the turn of the century while addressing the association of female mobility with female sexuality. From early 20 th century modernism to postmodern, African-American and postcolonial literature, the revival of representations of female errancy, fugitivity and rebelliousness compose a great specter of antihegemonic poetics across different ethnic literatures, genres, and media. From Colette's The Vagabond (1910) to Proust's The Fugitive (1925) and Djuna Barnes' Nightwood (1936), and from Kateb Yacine's Nedjma (1952) to Tony Morisson's Beloved (1987), female wanderers and runaways reveal the literary, cultural and political relevance of a hitherto unstudied "character," the male variants of which peopled the picaresque novel. Deprived of property, social respectability, and imperialistic drives, female wanderers embrace precariousness, liminality, and willfulness in movies such as Jane Campion's
Recherches En Psychanalyse, Feb 1, 2008
... 16 Il revient à Angela de nous révéler le sens de l'œuvre et du sujet. ... Retour. [ 4] ... more ... 16 Il revient à Angela de nous révéler le sens de l'œuvre et du sujet. ... Retour. [ 4] El Angel Exterminator. Film de 1962. Réalisation de Luis Bunuel, scénario de Luis Alcoriza : adaptation d'une pièce de théâtre de José Bergamin. Retour. [ 5] Rimbaud A., Lettres dites du voyant. ...
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Papers by Christina Kkona
_Migrating Minds: Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism_ is hosted by Georgetown University, Washington D.C., and co-supported by the “Plurielles” Research Group, Bordeaux Montaigne University, France.
The Inaugural Issue is scheduled to appear in Fall 2023.
The journal invites submissions for its first regular issue, Vol. 1 (1), Spring 2024.
For inquiries about proposals, please contact the editors-in-chief at migratingminds@georgetown.edu by October 13, 2023.
Submission deadlines:
December 15, 2023 for full-text articles;
January 19, 2024 for book reviews and review articles.
Please visit: migratingminds.georgetown.edu
Twitter @MigratingMinds_
Migrating Minds contributes to the prominent interdisciplinary domain of Cosmopolitan Studies with twenty innovative essays by
humanities scholars from all over the world that re-examine theories and practices of cosmopolitanism from a variety of
perspectives. The volume satisfies the need for a stronger involvement of Comparative and World Literatures and Cultures,
Translation, and Education Theories in this crucial debate, and also proposes an experimental way to explore in depth the
necessity of a cosmopolitan method as well as the riches of cosmopolitan representations.
The essays follow a logical progression from the situated philosophical and political foundations of the debate to interdisciplinary
propositions for a pedagogy of cosmopolitanism through studies of modern and contemporary cosmopolitan cultural practices
in literature and the arts and the concurrent analysis of prototypes of cosmopolitan identities. This trajectory allows readers to
appreciate new historical, theoretical, aesthetic, and practical implications of cosmopolitanism that pertain to multiple genres
and media, under different modes of production and reception.
In the de-territorialized landscape of Migrating Minds, mental and sentimental mobility, rather than the legacy of place, is the key
to an efficient, humanist response to deadening globalization.
understandings of the world, such as racist ideologies, as well as 2) practices of minor cultures, threatened by
the homogenizing politics of globalization. However, “native” (indigenous, autochthon, aboriginal, “first
nations”, traditional, regional, etc.) cultural products may constitute a powerful translation of the universal into
experiential truth. Neither national nor international, this “remedial” nativism often seeks its values in the
vernacular, the folklore or a fantasy of a return to primitive or sacred sources addressing at the same time a
claim to cosmopolitanism.
The same can be said of “cosmopolitanism”, which can be both seen as a positive and open form of
multiculturalism, or, in a nationalistic and closed perspective, as the loss of a national identity and its socalled
“values”.
Nativism and cosmopolitanism therefore appear to be, albeit paradoxically, closely linked, either as
complementary expressions of a cultural, social and historical complex identity, or on the contrary, as radical
opposites, used by both sides to define their respective territories.
However, these terms evoke also a wide range of connected notions (borders, local, global, national and
transnational, etc.), which must be taken into account when analyzing the narrations and representations
produced within these frames.
Analyzing both terms in their multiple nuances, this seminar seeks to explore their possible intersections,
conflicting or complicit, through the comparative study of specific literary works of different eras and
locations. Is the notion of nativism in its double meaning relevant to literary studies? Is it possible to talk about
a universalizing nativism? In that case, what connects it with or differentiates it from romantic nationalisms?
Our aim is not to exclusively focus on questions of postcolonial, nonEuropean
or minor literatures; we also
encourage papers that address the ambiguities of European and NorthAmerican
literatures with a strong local
or regional claim.
The seminar will seek to explore the following questions:
1) How can literature reach transhistoric or planetary levels through local/ethic rootedness?
25/07/2018 Intersections between Nativism and Cosmopolitanism | American Comparative Literature Association
https://www.acla.org/intersections-between-nativism-and-cosmopolitanism 2/2
2) How do literary works depict or promote world citizenship without falling into abstractions or turning the
cosmopolitan experience into mere heritage?
3) What kinds of narratives revolve around the idea of the « native », either as a locally specific beingintheworld
or as confinement within or exclusion from a specific community?
4) Do modern rewritings or parodies of foundational texts make a plea for the universal or for distinctive
local/regional values?
5) Is the notion of the “glocal” just another name for hybridity or a complacent oxymoron that aims to hide the
fundamental incompatibility between nativism and cosmopolitanism, or can it still be unravelled in a
productive fashion?
As the title implies, the volume discusses cosmopolitanism as an attitude and a thought process, but also as an object of fictional, documentary, and social representations, trying to move away from the divisive premise of radical difference, and implying, instead, that all communities are traversed by differentiations, oppositions and contradictions. Authors propose a solidarity of reason, able to craft interpretive norms and teaching methods that transcend exclusive localisms.