Modern American Grotesque

Author : James Goodwin,Professor James Goodwin
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0814211089

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Modern American Grotesque by James Goodwin,Professor James Goodwin Pdf

Modern American Grotesque by James Goodwin explores meanings of the grotesque in American culture and explains their importance within our literature and photography. What Flannery O'Connor said in the 1950s of American mass media—that the problem for a serious writer of the grotesque is “one of finding something that is not grotesque”—is incalculably truer today. Ask people what they find grotesque in the national scene and many will readily offer examples from tabloid journalism, extreme movie genres, reality shows, celebrity news, YouTube, and the like. As contemporary life is increasingly given over to such surface phenomena, it is an appropriate time to examine the more deeply rooted places of the grotesque as a literary and visual tradition over the last full century. A lineage of the modern grotesque evolved in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, and Flannery O'Connor, and the photography of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Each of these artists adopts the grotesque in order to recontextualize American culture and society and thereby to advance an attitude toward our collective history. To understand the deep structure of the grotesque Goodwin's book calls upon contexts that involve visual aesthetics, theories of comedy, prose stylistics, the technology of photography, ideas of reflexivity, and concepts of racial difference.

Author : James Goodwin
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2015-09-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0814252354

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Modern American Grotesque by James Goodwin Pdf

Modern American Grotesque by James Goodwin explores meanings of the grotesque in American culture and explains their importance within our literature and photography. What Flannery O'Connor said in the 1950s of American mass media-that the problem for a serious writer of the grotesque is "one of finding something that is not grotesque"-is incalculably truer today. Ask people what they find grotesque in the national scene and many will readily offer examples from tabloid journalism, extreme movie genres, reality shows, celebrity news, YouTube, and the like. As contemporary life is increasingly given over to such surface phenomena, it is an appropriate time to examine the more deeply rooted places of the grotesque as a literary and visual tradition over the last full century. A lineage of the modern grotesque evolved in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, and Flannery O'Connor, and the photography of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Each of these artists adopts the grotesque in order to recontextualize American culture and society and thereby to advance an attitude toward our collective history. To understand the deep structure of the grotesque Goodwin's book calls upon contexts that involve visual aesthetics, theories of comedy, prose stylistics, the technology of photography, ideas of reflexivity, and concepts of racial difference.

Author : William Van O'Connor
Publisher : Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 1962
Category : American literature
ISBN : UCAL:B4354236

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The Grotesque: an American Genre by William Van O'Connor Pdf

Author : Ralph Armando Ciancio
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 436 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 1991
Category : American fiction
ISBN : STANFORD:36105000061940

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The Grotesque in Modern American Fiction by Ralph Armando Ciancio Pdf

Author : Dieter Meindl
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0826210791

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American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque by Dieter Meindl Pdf

By synthesizing Kayser's and Bakhtin's views of the grotesque and Heidegger's philosophy of Being, American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque seeks to demonstrate that American fiction from Poe to Pynchon has tried to convey the existential dimension: the pre-individual totality or flow of life, which defines itself against the mind and its linguistic capacity. Dieter Meindl shows how the grotesque, through its self-contradictory nature, has been instrumental in expressing this reality-conception, an antirationalist stance in basic agreement with existential thought. The historical validity of this new metaphysics, which grants precedence to Being--the context of cognition--over the cognizant subject, must be upheld in the face of deconstructive animadversions upon any metaphysics of presence. The notion of decentering the subject, Meindl argues, did not originate with deconstruction. The existential grotesque confirms the protomodernist character of classic American fiction. Meindl traces its course through a number of well-known texts by Melville, James, Gilman, Anderson, Faulkner, and O'Connor, among others. To convey life conceived as motion, these writers had to capture--that is, immobilize--it in their art: an essentially distortive and, therefore, grotesque device. Melville's "Bartleby," dealing with a mort vivant, is the seminal text in this mode of indirectness. As opposed to the existential grotesque, which grants access to a preverbal realm, the linguistic grotesque of postmodern fiction works on the assumption that all reality is referable to language in a textual universe. American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque will significantly alter our understanding of certain traditions in American literature.

Author : Justin Edwards,Rune Graulund
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 142 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2013-05-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781134106059

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Grotesque by Justin Edwards,Rune Graulund Pdf

Grotesque provides an invaluable and accessible guide to the use (and abuse) of this complex literary term. Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund explore the influence of the grotesque on cultural forms throughout history, with particular focus on its representation in literature, visual art and film. The book: presents a history of the literary grotesque from Classical writing to the present examines theoretical debates around the term in their historical and cultural contexts introduce readers to key writers and artists of the grotesque, from Homer to Rabelais, Shakespeare, Carson McCullers and David Cronenberg analyses key terms such as disharmony, deformed and distorted bodies, misfits and freaks explores the grotesque in relation to queer theory, post-colonialism and the carnivalesque. Grotesque presents readers with an original and distinctive overview of this vital genre and is an essential guide for students of literature, art history and film studies.

Author : Leonard Cassuto
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : African Americans in literature
ISBN : 9780231103374

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The Inhuman Race by Leonard Cassuto Pdf

In revealing the source of the ideology of whiteness in the imagination, Cassuto turns to images of blackness in American literature and culture from 1622 to 1865, examining such texts as Swallow Barn, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Typee, and Moby Dick.

Author : Michael Jon Meyer,Michael J. Meyer
Publisher : Rodopi
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9051837933

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Literature and the Grotesque by Michael Jon Meyer,Michael J. Meyer Pdf

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Feral House
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2020-07-31
Category : Photography
ISBN : 9781627310031

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American Grotesque by Anonim Pdf

American Grotesque is a lavish retrospective of grotesque, occult, and erotic images by the forgotten Hollywood photographer William Mortensen (1897–1965), an innovative pictorialist visionary whom Ansel Adams called the "Antichrist" and to whom Anton LaVey dedicated The Satanic Bible. Mortensen's countless technical innovations and inspired use of special effects prefigures the development of digital manipulation and Photoshop. Includes a gallery of more than one hundred striking photographs in duotone and color, many of them previously unseen, and accompanying essays by Mortensen and others on his life, work, techniques, and influence.

Author : Robert L. McDonald
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2006-01-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780786423439

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Reading Erskine Caldwell by Robert L. McDonald Pdf

Erskine Caldwell has been compared to literary giants like Faulkner and Hemingway, yet he has also been reviled as peddler of pop trash. Was he a genius, or just a shooting star whose brilliance faded long before he stopped writing? Caldwell began his career in the late 1920s and gained fame for revealing the gritty backwoods South in novels such as his seminal Tobacco Road. He wrote prolifically, sometimes as much as a book a year. As the editor of this book maintains, perhaps anyone who wrote so much would inevitably stumble. These 12 essays explore a variety of issues. They discuss Caldwell as humorist, social commentator, modernist, and revolutionary novelist. They examine his themes and tropes (political images, social injustice, the environment, ideological struggles) and his use of artistic devices (short stories, cubist strategies, repetition). A generous bibliography includes not only books on Caldwell but also chapters and forewords, journal articles, essays, news items and obituaries. The reader is encouraged to look at Caldwell with fresh eyes, to press beyond his controversial image, and to compare his works, especially his early ones, to those of any of the top names in literature.

Author : Ib Johansen
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 512 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2015-08-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789004303713

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Walking Shadows by Ib Johansen Pdf

Walking Shadows focuses on the American fantastic and the American grotesque, attempting in this manner for the first time to establish an overview of and a theoretical approach to two literary modes that have often been regarded as essential to an understanding of the American cultural canon.

Author : Robert Dunne
Publisher : Kent State University Press
Page : 166 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0873388275

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A New Book of the Grotesques by Robert Dunne Pdf

Sherwood Anderson, remembered chiefly as a writer of short stories about life in the Midwest at the turn of the century, was acknowledged as an innovator of the short story form. This book looks at Anderson's early fiction from contemporary interpretative methodologies, particularly from poststructuralist approaches.

Author : Michael J. Meyer
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 207 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2023-04-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789004656475

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Literature and the Grotesque by Michael J. Meyer Pdf

Author : Natsuo Kirino
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2007-03-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307267290

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Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino Pdf

Life at the prestigious Q High School for Girls in Tokyo exists on a precise social axis: a world of insiders and outsiders, of haves and have-nots. Beautiful Yuriko and her unpopular, unnamed sister exist in different spheres; the hopelessly awkward Kazue Sato floats around among them, trying to fit in.Years later, Yuriko and Kazue are dead — both have become prostitutes and both have been brutally murdered. Natsuo Kirino, celebrated author of Out, seamlessly weaves together the stories of these women’s struggles within the conventions and restrictions of Japanese society. At once a psychological investigation of the pressures facing Japanese women and a classic work of noir fiction, Grotesque is a brilliantly twisted novel of ambition, desire, beauty, cruelty, and identity by one of our most electrifying writers.

Author : David McCracken
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2020-10-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781476678177

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Chuck Palahniuk and the Comic Grotesque by David McCracken Pdf

With the success of Fight Club, his novel-turned-movie, Chuck Palahniuk has become noticed for accurately capturing the exploitation of power in America in the 21st century. With cynicism and skepticism, he satirizes the manipulative aspects of ideologies and beliefs pushing society's understanding of the norm. In this work, Palahniuk's characters are analyzed as people who rebel against the systems in control. Mikhail Bakhtin's theory is applied to explain Palahniuk's application of the comic grotesque; theories from Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek help reveal aspects of ideology in Palahniuk's writing.