Abstract
Repulsion is not a pure negative emotion. With repulsion, people can tell cleanness from dirtiness, beauty from ugliness, and good from evil. Central to repulsion is the denial of the existence of the other. Repulsion can be divided into physical, material, emotional, and symbolic loathness. Repulsion may be combined with other emotions to form new feelings such as nausea, contempt, pessimism, and arrogance or destructive desire. Most moral norms in human history are constructed through cultivation of people’s repulsion or sense of disgust. In the first place, people construct taboos by defining dirtiness, establish morality through taboos, and stabilize moral systems through group aversion. Changes in ideas about repulsion can even change customs, and stabilize and unite the society. Repulsion is always accompanied by aesthetic activities and participates in aesthetic process, and repulsive things can also be aesthetic objects. It is an important goal of modern art to express or arouse repulsion. Art and literature constantly attempt to explore the field of aversion, in order to form the motive for revolutions in art. Critical literary works, through arousing a common sense of repulsion, achieve the goal of transforming the society, and as such arousing a common sense of disgust is a mission of writers.
First Page
148
Last Page
156
Recommended Citation
Tan, Guanghui. 2021. "Semiotic Analysis of “Repulsion” and Its Social and Aesthetic Functions." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 41, (5): pp.148-156. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol41/iss5/19
