ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi's postmodern novel La nave de los locos, a text informed by various personal experiences of exile. La nave de los locos Peri Rossi echoes Kristeva's location of the negativity and refusal pertaining to the marginal in woman, in order to undermine the phallocentric order that defines woman as marginal in the first place. Peri Rossi goes to explain in the interview that she immediately recognized how this extremely negative attitude to women's writing encapsulated far more widespread limitations founded upon the polarization of gender roles in her social arena. Metaphors of excess and overflow are therefore apt for the description of the exile's situation, and these also play upon paradigmatic understandings of woman as the embodiment of excess. The overall story told to everyone here is one inciting self-knowledge and knowledge of the world, achieved by the willingness to adopt different perspectives by recognizing the view of the other as meaningful.
