“Being then nothing”physicality, abjection and creation in Janice Galloway’s short fiction

  1. Sacido Romero, Jorge 1
  1. 1 English and German Department, University of Santiago de Compostela
Revista:
IJES: international journal of English studies

ISSN: 1578-7044

Ano de publicación: 2019

Título do exemplar: Open Issue

Volume: 19

Número: 1

Páxinas: 133-150

Tipo: Artigo

DOI: 10.6018/IJES.348531 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDIGITUM editor

Outras publicacións en: IJES: international journal of English studies

Resumo

This article explores the prominence of the body in Janice Galloway’s short fiction. Drawing mainly on Kristeva’s notions of the semiotic and the abject, the argument initially establishes the central place of physicality in Galloway’s poetics. Her creative project is inspired by a desire to transmit in writing the experience of being alive, of how being is intrinsically fragile, inexorably bound to extinction. In a particularly sharp manner that engages the reader more actively than her novels, her short stories exhibit both formally and thematically an interaction of the symbolic and the semiotic. As being attentive to life entails an awareness of death if one is to write realistically, the ensuing discussion of stories from her three collections –Blood (1991), Where you find it (1996) and Jellyfish (2015)– reveals that abjection, the extreme version of the semiotic that threatens to cancel out the symbolic, is paramount in her creative universe.

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Información de financiamento

This article is part of the research carried out in the project Intersections: Gender and Identity in the Short Fiction of Contemporary British Women Writers funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Government of Spain (FEM2017-83084-P – AEI/FEDER) and the Competitive Reference Research Group Discourse and Identity (GRC2015/002 GI-1924 – Xunta de Galicia). Thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers of IJES for their invaluable suggestions and comments.

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