The amatory S/subject in Allan Popa's Samsara: A tale of love?

• Main Author: Calilao, Christopher Paulo A.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2005
• Subjects: Popa; Allan C > Poetry; Poems > Collections; Poets; Filipino; Comparative Literature
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/2124
• Institution: De La Salle University

This thesis analyzes seven poems of Allan Popa, namely Gift , Makata , and the five-part sequence Mga Usapin ng Puso , which were all culled from his book, Samsara, in light of Julia Kristeva's theory of the semiotic. In particular, this thesis questions whether the aforementioned poems are fit to be called amatory discourses in the Kristevan sense. According to Kristeva, for any discourse to become amatory, it must be able to capture the drives and/or affects that inform the condition in language. This task mainly credited to the semiotic devices that she developed: morphophonematic, syntactic, pronomial and contextual. All these devices disrupt the symbolic of language--and thus, the symbolic O / order as well--by interrupting the punctual presentation of meaning through words. The results of the study show that only four of the aforementioned poems were able to access the semiotic of language satisfactorily and, thus, are the only ones who are able to capture the effect of the amatory condition and become valid lover's discourses. The rest, although able to access the semiotic of language, were unable to at least give it equal importance with the symbolic. These fail to put to the forefront the semiotic of language, and thus, seem to be concerned with presenting the narratives they contain.