The Semiotic Pulsions of Dickinson’s Poetry and their Medicinal Virtues

The central thesis of this essay is that Dickinson’s work has significant implications for a critical medical humanities open to the interface between language and embodiment. We show by employing what Kristeva would refer as highly effective aesthetically potent genotextuality, Dickinson manages transmit pain grief. She thereby enables process de-insulation sharing, which can have therapeutic effects on reader/listener. Here, suffering not refined into erudition, beauty or even nothingness result denial. Dickinson, we argue, becomes one Kristeva’s poet-surgeons abjection, poetess who cultivated only loyalty malaise, but also overcoming inability share malaise. means accomplishes effect, demonstrate, via semiotic pulsions her potential facilitate establishment democracy proximity, resonates with deepest levels human experience.