Tudies on the Female Body

tudies on the Female Body Etudes sur le corps de la femme Estudios sobre el cuerpo de la mujer S █ Paul Nanu █ Oana Ursache (Eds.) ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ The present work represents an interdisciplinary research endeavour published as result of a partnership between the Departments of Romanian at the Universities of Turku (Finland) and Granada (Spain), and the Institute of Romanian Language in Bucharest (Romania). ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Cover image and chapter images © Carmen Sveduneac © Romanian Language and Culture (2016) School of Languages and Translation Studies University of Turku █ █ █ ISBN 978-951-29-6403-1 (Print) ISBN 978-951-29-6404-8 (Online) Printed in Finland www.ficros.eu ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ tudies on the Female Body Etudes sur le corps de la femme Estudios sobre el cuerpo de la mujer S▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ █ Paul Nanu █ Oana Ursache (Eds.) University of Turku 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ █ STUDIES ON THE FEMALE BODY ROMANIŢA CONSTANTINESCU The Metamorphosis of the Female Body into the Male Body between Dystopia and Utopia. A Contemporary Myth in Mircea Cărtărescu’s The Twins ● 11 IRINA ALBERTI & NICOLAE STANCIU Female Bodies and Souls in Central Asia. An Oral History of Self and Gaze ● 23 MONICA OPRESCU The Diabolique Feminine between Decadence and Aestheticism. Female Dandies, Courtesans, Innocents ● 41 LHOUSSAIN SIMOUR Picturing Moroccan Women’s Bodies. Collectable Subjects and the Lure of Distant Lands in French Colonial Photography ● 49 CRISTINA NANU, HYOJIN KIM & PAUL NANU Female and Male Attitude about Having Cosmetic Surgery in Korea and Romania ● 65 EMILIA IVANCU Journeys onto the Female Body in Postcolonial Literature. Mapping and Identity with Salman Rushdie and VS Naipaul ● 73 ANDRA BRUCIU-COZLEAN Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Female Corporality and Symbolism in the Representations of Ad Astra (1894, 1907) ● 85 PAUL NANU The Human Body as an Object of Pathological Experiment. From the French noir to Pedro Almodóvar ● 93 ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ █ ETUDES SUR LE CORPS DE LA FEMME STEPHANIE CHAPUIS-DESPRES L’examen du corps féminin : choisir une femme dans le Saint-Empire romain germanique (xvie-xviie siecle) ● 103 CORINA-ELENA MOLDOVAN Le spectacle du corps dans un roman fin-de-siècle. Le Mime Bathylle de Jean Bertheroy ● 123 KARIMIAN FARZANEH Kanizou (Esclave). Etude socio-narratologique du corps féminin ● 131 LOUIS BEGIONI La féminisation des noms propres dans l’aire dialectale italienne d’Emilie Occidentale (Province de Parme). La dérivation suffixale et la détermination des prénoms. Eléments de comparaison avec l’italien ● 151 ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ █ ESTUDIOS SOBRE EL CUERPO DE LA MUJER CĂTĂLINA PÎNZARIU & ADEL FARTAKH Cuerpo, identidad y realidad cultural de la mujer. Hipóstasis funcionales léxicas ● 159 MAGDALENA SPYCHAJ Impacto del Teatro del Oprimido(a) entendido como el lenguaje corporal en las vidas y los cuerpos de las mujeres. Los casos Grupo Marías do Brasil y Madalenas- Teatro das Oprimidas en Rio de Janeiro ● 167 OANA URSACHE Frida Kahlo. Indumentaria e identidad ● 187 ENRIQUE NOGUERAS & CARMEN SVEDUNEAC Cuerpo y mujeres en Ausiàs March ● 203 ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ L’obscurité Des jambes de la jeune fille Qui puise de l’eau Uejima Onitsura (1660-1738) ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ●●● Studies on the Female Body █ Paul Nanu & Oana Ursache (Eds.) Studies on the Female Body ____________________________________________________________ THE METAMORPHOSIS OF THE FEMALE BODY INTO THE MALE BODY BETWEEN DYSTOPIA AND UTOPIA. A CONTEMPORARY MYTH IN MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU’S THE TWINS █ Romaniţa Constantinescu █ University of Heidelberg █ Germany ABSTRACT The Twins is a short story that includes several other stories: it is a love story with an unexpected ending that questions the limits of love; it is a tale of the recurrence between the female and the male elements in the personal history of the body and of identity beyond gender. It questions the power of the discourse to constitute and surpass gender and invests the reader with the ability to go beyond the perspective towards it. What, at some point, might appear as a dystopia from the own gender perspective, might in the end prove to be at least intelligible and capable of provoking empathy, if not even become utopically seductive. Since it is generally accepted that the literary works maintain a privileged access to the main field of ontological abundancy (Buttler, 1990). I suggest below an exercise of close reading, without burdening the analysis with explicit references to interpretative models, which, nonetheless, will not remain hidden to the reader. KEYWORDS Metamorphosis, female body, dystopia, gender, queer identity. ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ The Twins1 is, first and foremost, an atrocious love story, the cruelest I have ever read, since it dares to suggest plausibility and, hence, to make credible one of our 1 The story was written in 1983 and read in the same year with the name Terato in the literary circle Junimea, held in the attic of the Letters Faculty of the University of Bucharest. It was first published in 1989 in the volume Visul (The Dream), which was amputated by the censorship, by the publishing house Cartea Românească and received, at that time, the Prize of the Romanian Academy. The title has been changed for the readers not to associate the book with Andrei 11 Romaniţa Constantinescu The Metamorphosis of the Female Body into the Male Body between Dystopia and Utopia. A Contemporary Myth in Mircea Cărtărescu’s The Twins _____________________________________________________________ most anxiety provoking specters: that of the transgression of our own gender. The teenage tribulations of an unrequited love are ended unexpectedly by a night of lovemaking, which is followed by the couple Andrei-Gina (the names are obviously not arbitrary), waking up in an inversed state: each one, prisoner in the other one’s body, conscious of their irreducible alienation. Non plus ultra and, nevertheless, the paroxysm is not reached yet: the new, obtained by means of metamorphosis, threatens to drown even the last remains of gender consciousness of what could be called the life before this radical sex change. Identity beyond the body becomes utopic, an unstable presence, a transitory state. The body is doomed to hopeless oblivion. The double metamorphosis suffered by the protagonists is not reversible and forces both of them to hastily assume the social identity of the other, to put on their clothes. Several days later, the two of them, fighting not to lose their last flickers of consciousness, of gender in a substituted foreign body, commit suicide, each of them in the other one’s body, in the other one’s home. What the short story does is to only give reality (body) to the terror of language, to imagine with realistic details the transition from the figurative to the literal. Andrei writes a letter to Gina confessing that he would have liked to be able to get into her brain, “her nerves, her veins, all the cells of her body”, in order for him to understand “who she was”, to be able “to communicate totally with her” (139). The absolute demands of the first love, of total empathy, that of exchanging bodies, to lose themselves completely in their loved ones’ bodies, to know the ultimate secrets of their bodies, to occupy them completely, to become one with them, are ruthlessly satisfied to the letter. The pretentious ethics of the first love confidently verifies the melancholic aesthetics of the androgyn, yet turns the myth of the retrieval and the dissolution of the differences between the two sexes in a savage dystopia. It hereby accentuates the limits of love: the love for the other (which is the heterosexual love) or for the same (homosexual love) is not transgressive; it excludes the metamorphosis into the other. The other or the same never become the own, which love has always been avoiding. This is why narcissism is contrary to love. But what if the love for the other and the same is due to the fact that they have been, at some point – during the ontogeny, the childhood, the pre- puberty and, still, within the dream – part of the own or even the own? And what if history were reversible? If we could return to the androgynous state or, as it happens with almost all returns, in a perverted, post-mythical state, where the sexes merge one into the other, but without achieving a co-presence, but by Tarkowski’s movie Nostalghia, filmed in exile in Italy in 1983. The story was republished unabridged in the short story collection Nostagia, in 1993 by the publishing house Humanitas (Bucharest). The stories were translated into French (Le Rêve, 1992), German (Nostalgia, 1997), Hungarian (Sóvárgás, 1997), Norwegian (Nostalgien, 2000), Swedish (2002), Italian (2003), English (New Directions Publishing Corporation, translation by Julian Semilian, with an introduction by Andrei Codrescu, 2005), Bulgarian (2007), Spanish (2012). 12 Paul Nanu & Oana Ursache (Eds.) Studies on the Female Body ____________________________________________________________ usurping each other, during the displacement? This is what Mircea Cărtărescu asks us to imagine. The beginning of the story confronts the reader with its very end: the metamorphosis has already taken place in our absence, like in Kafka’s story, but, as opposed to it, after the horrible event, nothing is possible

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