Revisiting the Semiotic: A Study of Jorie Graham’s Poetic Consciousness in Sea Change

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Ph.D. Candidate of English Language and Literature, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran.

Abstract

The present paper analyzes Jorie Graham’s “Sea Change”, the eponymous poem of her 2008 poetry collection, through Julia Kristeva’s theories on semiotic and the abject. By tracing the historical attitudes towards embodiment, this research attempts to examine Graham’s outlook towards the mind/body and by extension nature/culture dichotomies in her poetry. The previous studies on the Sea Change collection have mostly focused on Graham’s formal structures and ecological concerns; no other research has used Kristeva’s theories to examine the importance of one’s embodied experience of the world in her poetry to reveal how negative attitudes towards the body lead to a fractured existence for the human subject. Graham’s poetic language addresses the neglect to which the semiotic has been subjected, redefines the body in terms that are not abject and opens up a safe cultural space for it. Her poetry illuminates how mystification and degradation of the body have a positive correlation with oppression of the nature, as concepts belonging to similar dichotomous lines of thought, and highlights the call for a re-evaluation of the attitudes towards the human subject’s existence in the world.

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References

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Critical Literary Studies
Volume 7, Issue 1 - Serial Number 13
October 2024
Pages 183-198

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History

  • Receive Date: 20 March 2023
  • Revise Date: 27 September 2023
  • Accept Date: 02 October 2024

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