ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the interrelated concepts to bear on the reading of one of Cristina Femandez Cubas's short stories, "Lunula y Violeta," from the first, and ground-breaking, collection of stories Mi hermana Elba. It shows that the critical excess implicit in the attempt to weave together so many different, if related, theoretical strands in the reading of the story is appropriate precisely because the story itself foregrounds excess, on a thematic, as well as discursive level. Such a critically palimpsestic, and somewhat monstrous, reading becomes one way to acknowledge the theoretical significance of the representation of women's reading and writing as a "monstrous," excessive enterprise within the story itself. "Lunula y Violeta," in fact, is the story of two fantastically monstrous, grotesquely abject figures who, by means of their struggles with layer-upon-layer of palimpsestic writing and reading, explore, or, indeed represent, the dangerous irruption of the semiotic within the symbolic.
