Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

injurious actions directed towards a specific target; and the third explains how
transgressions typically aim to cross established boundaries; while the final
conceptualization alludes more directly to the “carnivalesque” nature of transgression as
it seeks to invert established hierarchies, implying that typically, it originates from what
are considered to be “low” forms of cultural expression and are directed towards “high”
culture. In brief, Julius concludes that “Four essential meanings emerge, then: the
denying of doctrinal truths; rule-breaking, including the violation of principles,
conventions, pieties or taboos; the giving of serious offense; and the exceeding, erasing
or disordering of physical or conceptual boundaries” (19)—or, in other words, violations
of dogma, custom, person and/or practice.
While Julius’s study focuses on the visual arts, post-structuralist Michel Foucault
is mostly concerned with transgression as it specifically pertains to the written word.
Shifting slightly from the time-frame that Julius considers to be the “transgressive
period” in the visual arts, Foucault retraces in The Order of Things the transgressive
period in literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century in considering authors that
are in rupture with the tradition of language inherited from the Renaissance:
[A]t the beginning of the nineteenth century, at a time when
language was burying itself within its own density as an object and
allowing itself to be traversed, through and through, by knowledge,
it was also reconstituting itself elsewhere, in an independent form,
difficult of access, folded back upon the enigma of its own origin
and existing wholly in reference to the pure act of writing.
Literature becomes progressively more differentiated from the
discourse of ideas, and encloses itself within a radical
intransitivity; it becomes detached from all the values of which
were able to keep it in general circulation during the Classical age
(taste, pleasure, naturalness, truth), and creates within its own
space everything that will ensure a ludic denial of them (the
scandalous, the ugly, the impossible). (300)
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