Ciało jako znak w przestrzeni tekstu. Rozważania tożsamościowe wokół Błękitu Tedźi Grower
Body as a sign in the textual space. Some reflections on identity in Teji Grover’s Blue

Author(s): Kamila Junik-Łuniewska
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: corporality; identity; subject; sign; body; text
Summary/Abstract: In her article, the author discusses the problem of corporality (body) of a subject, in reference to the writer’s/narrator’s search for her or his own identity. The analyses are based on a prose piece by Teji Grover [Tejī Grovar], a contemporary Hindi writer.The subject’s identity is unstable, changeable, reveals a breakage and, thus, remains in a constant need of auto-creation. The author of the article supports the main idea by referring to the concept of self and showing that the contemporary subject is of a dual nature, divided between I and me – being simultaneously the subject and object of its own actions and reactions. The subject in the novel, she argues, experiences her own body in three ways: in relation to touch (by a man/lover); by changing the narrative’s “I” into “she” and/or by producing own replica(s) (images), separate from her sexuality and desire, in order to make the body visible, present, accessible; by changing her body into text. The latter may be explained literally – as forming the body from letters, constructing a literary corpus, and metaphorically: as writing about carnal experiences in the very text of the novel. There, the subject re-fashions her body into the textual space of own writing, and in this way re-presents and re-creates her own identity.

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