The Triumph Of The Abject: A Kristevan Analysis Of Bora Chung's “The Head”
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Date
2023
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Abstract
This study aims to explore South Korean writer Bora Chung's “The Head” from the writer's
short story collection Cursed Bunny (2021) through the lens of Julia Kristeva's notion of
“the abject”. Haunting readers with its creepy image of a talking head made up of the
nameless female protagonist's bodily waste, “The Head” forces them to ponder on the
notion of the abject and the competency of the symbolic order to repress or exclude it, or the
lack thereof as represented in Chung's story. “The Head” strikingly reects the gradual
process of the disintegration of the female protagonist's sense of self and unity when the
head as the abject becomes an inseparable part of her life. Despite the woman's efforts to
get rid of the head and thus maintain the symbolic order, the head's growing inuence on
the woman's life as a threatening force on her identity to the point of replacing her in the
end hints at the inescapable presence of the abject. By applying Julia Kristeva's notion of
“the abject”, this study will focus on the abject as an integral component of the human
psyche and the failure of the symbolic laws and rules to ward off and purify the abject as
represented in Chung's “The Head”. Through a Kristevan analysis of the story, it will be
concluded that the semiotic realm as symbolized by what could be called “the triumph of
the abject” in the story eventually prevails over the symbolic order by transgressing the
boundaries between self/other, inside/outside and cleanliness/delement and thus
making us realize the tenuousness and vulnerability of these borders
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Keywords
Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny, “The Head”, Kristeva, Abject