The body as a battlefield: conflict rhetoric and self-sacrifice in “Тhe Sin of Мàltitsa”
Authors:
Velika
Gyulemerova
Prof. Dr. Asen Zlatarov University, Burgas, Bulgaria
Pages:
57-
65
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/FESL2514
Abstract:
The article analyzes Liliana Mihaylova’s novel „The Sin of Maltitsa“ through the lens of conflictual rhetoric and discursive violence. It focuses on female self-sacrifice as a communicative act and on language as a performative force that produces guilt and social exclusion. The female body is conceptualized as a text onto which power, fear, and moral sanctions are inscribed. The analysis examines curses and public shaming as ritualized forms of symbolic violence through which the community stabilizes its boundaries. Although the revolutionary problematic is not developed in a panoramic manner, the text is implicitly linked to the context of the April Uprising, which serves as the narrative’s moral and historical horizon. The novel is read as a critique of mimetic violence and of the post-Liberation displacement of moral values.
Keywords:
conflictual rhetoric, discursive violence, self-sacrifice, public shaming, mimetic violence, post-Liberation value crisis.
Download