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In this paper, I try to approach the archetype of the wild woman from two characters, one from the classical literary tradition and the other from the oral literary tradition. The first is Medea, a character from the Hellenistic epic Argonautica, by the Alexandrian poet Apollonius of Rhodes. The second is Juliana, a character from the traditional Iberian ballad Juliana, sung by the informer Dona Maria, from the municipality of Santa Rosa de Lima / Sergipe, and published by the folklorist Jackson da Silva Lima in her Romanceiro Sergipano. The intertextual reading of the two poems aims to show how the archetype of the wild woman is configured in each of them and what are the implications of this configuration in the compared text messages. As theoretical support, the approach is based on the philosophical, philological, historical and psychological reflections, among others, of the following authors: Ana Alexandra Alves de Sousa, Rachel Gazolla, Marco Zingano, Donald Schüler, Salvatore D’Onofrio e Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

WHEN ADAPTATION AND INTERTEXTUALITY MERGE TO CREATE UTOPIA: AN ANALYSIS OF “RUNNING WITH THE WOLVES” BY AURORA

This work aims to analyze the song “Running with the wolves” by Aurora, regarding its connections with the contemporary utopian-distopian continuum, present in the late dystopian novels, and the links with Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

Re-Envisioning Female Power

Bricolage, the mixing of diverse religious resources, has been highlighted as a key process in contemporary spiritualities. Since, in this process, historically or culturally distant and foreign traditions are self-referentially drawn upon as representatives of a true spirituality deemed lost in the materialistic West, exoticism has further been identified as its core feature. In this article, through an in-depth ethnographic study, I examine operations of bricolage and exoticism in spiritual women workshops in North Western Europe that focused on the trope of the “wild woman.” In particular, I highlight the transformational power of these retreats in reference to Michael Taussig’s notion of mimesis as a sensuous embodiment of imagined otherness. I argue that, through enacting wildness in their bodies, the participants were overtaken by their own—historically determined—imaginations of primitiveness and naturalness, which not only created new visions of the feminine and female power, but also led to important life changes.

Engendering liminality: The experience of re-enchantment in wild woman workshops

According to Paul Heelas, new spiritualities radicalize the expressivist strand in modernity and, hence, not only affirm modern values but also react against them. In particular, they challenge the ‘bounded self’ as foundational for the modern being and progress. Charles Taylor, in discussing the emergence in modern times of ‘the buffered self’, points to three important changes: disenchantment, the loss of the complementary play between structure and anti-structure, and the replacement of the idea of cosmos with that of a neutral, mechanical universe. This article, through a detailed ethnographic study, explores how these changes are temporally counteracted in spiritual women workshops in North-West Europe focused on the trope of the ‘wild woman’. Moreover, it shows that these retreats bring into being ritual spaces of liminality, which have the potential to engender experiences of re-enchantment and/or give a new sense of interpersonal and cosmic connection.

Algerian Disorders: On Deconstructive Postcolonialism in Cixous and Derrida

This article explores Hélène Cixous’s and Jacques Derrida’s explicit revisiting of their Algerian memories, especially in their later work (mainlyReveries of the Wild WomanandMonolingualism of the Other). These texts offer a specifically deconstructive response to the colonial project in Algeria, attempting to think non-appropriative relations to otherness and processes of identification that exceed a self/other binary. Investigating the colonial principle that manifested itself in Algeria from the vantage point of their Judeo-Franco-Maghrebian situatedness, they derive from this position not accounts of cultural particularity, but analyses of (and alternatives to) colonial practices of identification: analyzing colonial and identity politics as harmful to a fundamental relationality to otherness and affirming a “spectral” zone without belonging that nonetheless carves out a life with, toward, and of the other, on the others’ sides, relational without being oblivious of antagonisms and violence.