TY - JOUR
T1 - S/Z in the Hispanic Context
T2 - Castration and Otherness in the Female Characters of Miguel de Cervantes and María de Zayas
AU - Montauban, Jannine
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos. All rights reserved.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - In S/Z (1970), an ambitious semiotic study of Honoré de Balzac’s “Sarrasine,” Roland Barthes analyzes the ideological oppositions behind this graphic differentiation based on observing an unexpected deviation from the norm in the male protagonist’s name. This article reveals that Barthes’s analysis is applicable to Cervantes’s and Zayas’s novellas, abounding as they are in female Moorish characters whose names begin with the letter Z. The presence of this Z is best understood, not in phonological terms, but from the perspective of the cultural fabric of seventeenth-century Spain, where the Z becomes the stamp that unequivocally denounces the otherness and social castration of the female characters.
AB - In S/Z (1970), an ambitious semiotic study of Honoré de Balzac’s “Sarrasine,” Roland Barthes analyzes the ideological oppositions behind this graphic differentiation based on observing an unexpected deviation from the norm in the male protagonist’s name. This article reveals that Barthes’s analysis is applicable to Cervantes’s and Zayas’s novellas, abounding as they are in female Moorish characters whose names begin with the letter Z. The presence of this Z is best understood, not in phonological terms, but from the perspective of the cultural fabric of seventeenth-century Spain, where the Z becomes the stamp that unequivocally denounces the otherness and social castration of the female characters.
KW - María de Zayas
KW - Miguel de Cervantes
KW - Roland Barthes’s S/Z
KW - female Moorish characters
KW - otherness
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85196424355&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.18192/rceh.v45i2.6693
DO - 10.18192/rceh.v45i2.6693
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85196424355
SN - 0384-8167
VL - 45
SP - 463
EP - 480
JO - Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos
JF - Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos
IS - 2
ER -