The Injured Body: Humiliation and Fragmentation

• Main Author: Graciela Mayet
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata 2017-03-01
• Series: Estudios de Teoría Literaria
• Subjects: cuerpos; fragmentos; tiempo; modernidd; vejez; subjetividad
• Online Access: http://fh.mdp.edu.ar/revistas/index.php/etl/article/view/1955

Simone de Beauvoir’s nouvelles and Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare present us opposite and complementary corporeal nature. In the first case, two women about their sixties are in front of the personal drama of their lost which happen through the years of ageing. It is a kind of fragmentation of existence. Ageing is the most authentic state of the human condition because the human being can only hang on to himself. In Titus Andronicus, are shown mutilations, murderers as fragmentation of biological body and social body. Individualism of modernity doesn’t forgive the bodies deteriorated by the years. In the early modernity, in the times of Elizabeth the First, like in the Ancient Rome, it wasn’t spared humiliations and violence towards the enemy body in order to impose power and authority. In this Shakespeare’s play, the fragmentation of the other’s body and murder are the emergence of social and individual violence.