Literary Theorists: Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva, was born in June 24, 1941 in Sliven, Bulgaria. She is a philosopher, theorist of literature and feminism, psychoanalyst and Bulgarian-born French writer. She was educated at a French school and then studied linguistics at the University of Sofia. In 1965, at the age of 24, she moved to Paris, studied at the University of Paris and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, while publishing articles in journals such as Tel Quel, Critique and Langages. From 1970-1983, she joined the editorial staff of Tel Quel. Currently, she teachesSemiotics in New York State University and the University of Paris VII "Denis Diderot". Her work, of great complexity, usually falls in the critique of structuralism (neo-structuralism and post-structuralism), influenced by Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud and, above all, Jacques Lacan. She is married to the French writer Philippe Sollers.

"Death lives a human life, said Hegel. This is true when we are not in love or analysis." Julia Kristeva make  the crossing of structuralism and semiotics. She was influenced by the May of 1968 and Maoism. With that spirit, she spoke at the French Institute in Madrid: “who is not in love nor psychoanalyze or write, is dead."
Julia Kristeva is now far from the major models and paradigms of the social sciences and literary theory that shook the university scene of the sixties and seventies. The abjection, love, melancholy, take their classes and their reflections. And for about seven or eight years everything revolves around his work as a psychoanalyst, consultation and their patients, including the topics she chooses for your university seminars. She was in Madrid to discuss the love-theme of her latest book, and mainly attracted an audience of psychoanalysts, not always satisfied with her original certainly unorthodox approaches. Explain that, indeed, who is not in love nor psychoanalyze or write, is dead.

Love stories Kristeva explains are woven myths and literary figures, in which the writer studied shows its semiotic and psychoanalytic wisdom: Narciso, Don Juan, Romeo and Juliet, the Virgin, the Troubadours, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Bataille, and Freud. In these books about love also becomes especially their theological knowledge density. Julia Kristeva says that she cares deeply the evocations of Karol Wojtyla, performing in her travels or in her speeches at the Vatican. A purpose of individualism, says without the slightest trace of irony: "After all, the need to accept yourself is a commandment of God in the Old Testament: Love yourself."

When asked if Julia Kristeva feels even radical, nods, but not grand gestures and a lot of passion, and the radical claims that her work is precisely the impact on people's lives through the "modest commitment psychoanalysis ", something like an absolutely microscopic and nothing momentous life change, to transform the world by reconciling people to themselves.

Jhony de Jesús Izquierdo

Two Object Poems

Jhony Izquierdo Heredia

Yuri Tinianov

Yuri Tinianov: The literary evolution

Literary history is largely dominated by an individualistic psychologist that has replaced the literary problems and reducing the literary richness with the psychology of the author. Also, this point of views psychologist was applied to problems like evolution or genesis literary.

      Literary history must meet the requirements of authenticity if want to become a science. All terms and foremost the term "literary history", should be examined. Literary history is taken from two points of view: the study of the genesis and the evolution of the literary series. According to what be analyzed will be how it is analyzed. The study of evolution must avoid the confusion of taking data from one system and used it for analysis in another system, avoid the subjective flavor.

The consideration of the work as a system can be linked with formal theories to understand the history of literature from the formal theory. The study of isolated elements (rhythm, syntax, work, theme, in prose and poetry) is helpful and thanks to this the structural hypothesis could isolate: the elements could be mingled and interact enter them in an constructive form.

          Constructive function is the ability of an element to enter in correlation with another belonging to system and outside the system. We must not fall into the comparison of elements in a system with another system without considering the constructive role.

What is a "literary event" for a time may be a only a linguistic element at another, according to the literary system in which it is situated. Isolated study of a work does not give us certainty about its construction. The autonomous function is the necessary condition for discover the literary functions and its constructive role in a particular culture.

Diego Elí Acosta Gárate

Lautremont’s Image

Beautiful as the encounter of a tear rolling down a butterfly´s cheek and the song of poetry.

María Angélica Cantarell

Beautiful like the meeting of a mermaid and a unicorn in a sparkle lake.

Marco Hernández

Beautiful as the encounter of a full moon into the dark side of the sun

Francisco Valenzuela

Beautiful like the meeting of a tiger and a camel on the snow.

Isabel Álvarez

Beautiful as the encounter of a tear and the pain on a cloud of sadness

Eyri Polanco

Beautiful as the encounter of each light illuminate to reach a happy ending.

Erika Sibaja

Beautiful as the chance meeting between ancientness and childhood road to hell

Erik Verdejo

Beautiful like the meeting of Romeo and Juliet on Disneyland.

Isabel Álvarez

Beautiful as the meeting between the moon and the sun reflecting in your eyes

Jhony Izquierdo

Beautiful as the encounter of the sea and the sky.

Daniel Perez Martinez

Beautiful as the encounter of the fantasy and your dreams.

Bryan Yahir Castañeda

Beautiful as the furtive encounter between a ballet shoes and a dancer in the middle of Beethoven's fifth symphony.

Angélica Carrillo

Literary Theorists: Mijail Bajtin

Carnival and carnivalesque: the vision of Mijail Bajtin

For the Russian theorist Mijail Bajtin, the carnival could be read like a book. It  creates an alternative social space, characterized by freedom, equality and abundance. During carnival, rank (otherwise pervasive in medieval society) is abolished and everyone is equal. People were reborn into truly human relations, which were not simply imagined but experienced. The body is here figured not as the individual or ‘bourgeois ego’ but as a growing, constantly renewed collective which is exaggerated and immeasurable. Life manifests itself not as isolated individuals but as a collective ancestral body. This is not, however, a collective order, since it is also continually in change and renewal. The self is also transgressed through practices such as masking.

Carnival is a kind of syncretic and ritualised pageantry which displays a particular perspective. It is a brief moment in which life escapes its official furrows and enacts utopian freedom. It is a form of life at once real and ideal, universal and without remainder. Its defining feature is festivity – life lived as festive. It is also sanctioned by the highest ideal aims of human existence, not by the world of practical conditions.
Reading this in a contemporary way, we might say that carnival is expressive rather than instrumental. It involves the expression of latent aspects of humanity, direct contact among people (as opposed to alienation), and an eccentric refusal of social roles. It brings together groups and categories which are usually exclusive. Time and space are rearranged in ways which show their contingency and indissolubility. All of this is done in a mood of celebration and laughter.

Bajtin suggests that it took the social changed of the Renaissance era (the 15th-16th centuries) for carnival to expand into the whole of social life. The awareness of contingency and natural cycles expanded into a historical view of time. This occurred because social changes undermined established hierarchies and put contingency on display. Medieval folk culture prepared the way for this Cultural Revolution.
Bajtin almost portrays this as a recuperation of carnivalesque: it was separated from folk culture, formalized, and made available for other uses. Yet Bajtin portrays this as a positive, creative process which continues to carry the creative spirit. Bajtin suggests that carnival and folk culture have been in decline since the eighteenth century.

Carnivals have turned into state-controlled parades or privatized holidays, humour and swearing have become merely negative, and the people’s ‘second life’ has almost ceased. However, Bajtin believes that the carnival principle is indestructible. It continues to reappear as the inspiration for areas of life and culture. Carnival contains a utopian promise for human emancipation through the free expression of thought and creativity. Rabelais stands out here for a style which is irreducibly unofficial and unserious, and irrecoverable by authoritarianism.

                                                                                                    Arly Fuentes

Literary Theorists: Aristotle

The Poetics by Aristotle 

The Poetics of Aristotle is a treatise by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) on the nature of poetic art and the relation of poetry to reality. He work consists of 26 chapters. Apparently, the work was originally composed of two parts: a first book on the tragedy and epic, and a second on comedy and iambic poetry that has been lost. The fundamental principle of the poetics is that a poem is a mimesis, that is, an imitation. A tragedy, in particular, is an imitation of an action.



Aristotle's Poetics seeks to address the different kinds of poetry, the structure of a good poem, and the division of a poem into its component parts. Aristotle defines poetry very broadly, including the types such as epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry, and even some kinds of music. According to Aristotle, the origin of poetry has two causes of connatural order: the first is that imitation is natural to man from childhood, acquiring their first knowledge through this; the second is about the joy that occurs by learning. He also lays out six elements of tragedy: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song. Plot is 'the soul' of tragedy, because action is paramount to the significance of a drama. A plot must have a beginning, middle, and end; it must also be universal in significance, have a determinate structure, and maintain a unity of theme and purpose.

Other important point is that the poetry was originated because of the existence of two factors or natural causes in man: first, the capacity and tendency to imitate and enjoy with imitations, and second, the ability of harmony and rhythm. He mentions that every work of art is a likeness or reproduction of an original is consistently maintained throughout the Aristotelian system of philosophy, and in the Poetics poetry is shown to be the highest form of reproductive art. The emotional catharsis which Aristotle attributes to the impact of tragedy is contrived by the spectacle, the structure, and the incidents of the play.

To sum up, Aristotle concludes that Epic poetry is like tragedy in that it reveals man to be better than he is but it is narrative in form, depending either on an omniscient first-person narrator, a third-person narrator, or a first-person narrating hero. A tragedy, meanwhile, involves the dialogue of two or more characters. Additionally, tragedy and epic poetry differ in length tragedy is confined usually to a single day, in the efforts to reveal a quick devolution of the hero. Epic poetry, meanwhile, often continues for a man's full lifetime.

                                                                                               Kenny Baruch García

Literary Theorists: Fray Luis de Leon

Poetic theory of Fray Luis de Leon

 Fray Luis de León (1527-1591). He was born Luis Ponce de León in Belmonte, in the Province of Cuenca, in 1527 or 1528. His parents were Lope de León and Inés de Varela. His father practiced laws, and the family moved to Madrid in 1534. Both of his parents had Jewish ancestry, so he would have been considered to be of convert lineage.
              Fray Luis entered the University of Salamanca at the age of fourteen, in 1541, to study Canon Law under the care of his uncle Francisco. In 1543 or 1544 he joined the Augustinian Order, and was professed as a friar at the Priory of San Pedro. In 1552, Fray Luis graduated with a bachelor’s degree in theology from the University of Toledo and continued his education as a student of Hebrew and Biblical interpretation at the University of Alcala de Henares.
                 In 1560 he graduated from the University of Salamanca as bachelor and Master of Theology, and in the following year he obtained a chair in Theology at the same university; in 1571 he attained the Chair of Sacred Letters. While at the University, he translated classical and biblical literature and wrote on religious themes.

                    He returned to the academic environment of the University of Salamanca as a professor of Biblical exegesis and held the chairs of Moral Philosophy and Biblical Studies. He was elected to the chair of Holy Scripture at the University of Salamanca in 1579, and went on to earn a Master of the Arts degree from the University of Sahagún.
                    Fray Luis did not pay heed to the cautionary admonishments of the Inquisitorial committee after his earlier imprisonment. In 1582, he had another Inquisitional run-in, but was not this time imprisoned. He was absolved two years later.
                    He died at the age of 64 on 23 August, 1591, in Madrigal de las Altas Torres, Avila, and is buried in Salamanca in the Priory of San Agustin. Ten days before his death he was elected Vicar General of the Augustinian Order.

                    Fray Luis was a great connoisseur of theology, especially the Bible, and wrote several commentaries in Latin to different books of the Bible. His knowledge of the biblical languages (Greek and Hebrew) gave him access to the original texts. Along with other intellectuals, Fray Luis criticized the Latin translations of the Bible, which respected little texts the Hebrew version. In addition to these theological works written in Latin, Fray Luis de León wrote prose and verse in Castilian.

                   The poetry of Fray Luis has three main sources: the Bible, Renaissance humanism and classicism. As Professor of Sacred Scripture, knows the Bible as the revealed message of divine origin, and as an artistic work. From the Bible comes the search for inner peace and harmony in union with the divine. As Renaissance man knows the new formal resources within the Italian poetic tradition of Petrarch, Bembo, Tasso. Fray Luis choose one verse of that poetic stream the lyre to express his poetic thought. As a humanist, drink in the classic tradition from several sources: the neo-Platonism and Stoicism. Classical authors also influence, especially Horace, whose shape the poetic translations of his original poems. The most influential work was the “Beatus ille” of Horacio. His translation of commentary of “Song of songs”, by Salomon, is a masterpiece of criticism literary, because in it Luis de Leon explores the text in its external and deepest meaning.

Erika Yashir Shibaja