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Author : William Van O'Connor
Publisher : Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 1962
Category : American literature
ISBN : UCAL:B4354236
Author : James Goodwin
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2015-09-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0814252354
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 : Dieter Meindl
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0826210791
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 : James Luther Adams,Wilson Yates
Publisher : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Art
ISBN : 0802842674
The authors focus on the religious and theological significance of grotesque imagery in art and literature, exploring the religious meaning of the grotesque and its importance as a subject for theological inquiry.
Author : William Van O'Connor
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 1962
Category : American literature
ISBN : STANFORD:36105010563091
Author : Michael J. Meyer
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 207 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2023-04-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789004656475
Author : Shirley F. Staton
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 492 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 1987
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0812212347
Literary Theories in Praxis analyzes the ways in which critical theories are transformed into literary criticism and methodology. To demonstrate the application of this analysis, critical writings of Roland Barthes, Harold Bloom, Cleanth Brooks, Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Norman Holland, Barbara Johnson, Jacques Lacan, Adrienne Rich, and Robert Scholes are examined in terms of the primary critical stance each author employs—New Critical, phenomenological, archetypal, structuralist/semiotic, sociological, psychoanalytic, reader-response, deconstructionist, or humanist. The book is divided into nine sections, each with a prefatory essay explaining the critical stance taken in the selections that follow and describing how theory becomes literary criticism. In a headnote to each selection, Staton analyzes how the critic applies his or her critical methodology to the subject literary work. Shirley F. Staton's introduction sketches the overall philosophical positions and relationships among the various critical modes.
Author : Paula M. Uruburu
Publisher : Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 1987
Category : History
ISBN : UOM:39015019227043
Moving from America's Puritan roots through the 19th and 20th centuries, The Gruesome Doorway examines the significance of the American Grotesque through an analysis of the works of Hawthorne, Poe, Crane, Norris, Anderson, West, and O'Connor. Dr. Uruburu explores the backgrounds and sources of the genre known as the Grotesque and reappraises the particular application of its «unconventional conventions» in American literature. The study reveals that this genre is peculiarly suited to a nation consistently torn between «high ideals» and «catch-penny realities, » whose inhabitants are pulled through the gruesome doorway into the landscape of the Grotesque.
Author : Frances K. Barasch
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2018-12-17
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783111715100
No detailed description available for "The grotesque".
Author : John R. Clark
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2014-07-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813161358
Thomas Mann predicted that no manner or mode in literature would be so typical or so pervasive in the twentieth century as the grotesque. Assuredly he was correct. The subjects and methods of our comic literature (and much of our other literature) are regularly disturbing and often repulsive -- no laughing matter. In this ambitious study, John R. Clark seeks to elucidate the major tactics and topics deployed in modern literary dark humor. In Part I he explores the satiric strategies of authors of the grotesque, strategies that undercut conventional usage and form: the de-basement of heroes, the denigration of language and style, the disruption of normative narrative technique, and even the debunking of authors themselves. Part II surveys major recurrent themes of grotesquerie: tedium, scatology, cannibalism, dystopia, and Armageddon or the end of the world. Clearly the literature of the grotesque is obtrusive and ugly, its effect morbid and disquieting -- and deliberately meant to be so. Grotesque literature may be unpleasant, but it is patently insightful. Indeed, as Clark shows, all of the strategies and topics employed by this literature stem from age-old and spirited traditions. Critics have complained about this grim satiric literature, asserting that it is dank, cheerless, unsavory, and negative. But such an interpretation is far too simplistic. On the contrary, as Clark demonstrates, such grotesque writing, in its power and its prevalence in the past and present, is in fact conventional, controlled, imaginative, and vigorous -- no mean achievements for any body of art.
Author : Hanna Boguta-Marchel
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2012-04-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781443839198
The most intriguing aspect of Cormac McCarthy’s writing is the irresistible premonition that his sentences carry an exceptional potential, that after each subsequent reading they surprise us with increasingly deeper layers of meaning, which are often in complete contradiction to the readers’ initial intuitions. His novels belong to the kind that we dream about at night, that follow us and do not let themselves be forgotten. Cormac McCarthy’s prose has been read in the light of a variety of theories, ranging from Marxist criticism, the pastoral tradition, Gnostic theology, the revisionist approach to the American Western, to feminist and eco-critical methodology. The perspective offered in The Evil, the Fated, the Biblical is an existentialist theological approach, which proposes a reading of McCarthy that focuses on the issue of evil and violence as it is dealt with in his novels. “Evil,” unquestionably being a metaphysical category and, as a result, quite commonly pronounced passé, is a challenging and overwhelming topic, which nevertheless deeply concerns all of us. Boguta-Marchel’s book is therefore an attempt to confront a theme that is an unpopular object of scholarly examination and, at the same time, a commonly shared experience in the everyday life of all human beings. The book follows the pattern of an increasingly in-depth analysis of the drama of evil that is omnipresent in McCarthy’s books: from the level of the visual (grotesque images, hyperbolic depictions of violence, cinematic precision of matter-of-fact descriptions), through the level of events (circularity and repetitiveness of action, characters conceptualizing and enacting the struggle between predetermined fate and good will), to the level of the metaphysical (existential crises, grappling with the idea and the person of God, biblical allusions reappearing in the text). This way, The Evil, the Fated, the Biblical provides a complete picture of McCarthy’s contest with one of the most troublesome issues that humanity has ever faced.
Author : Harold Bloom,Sterling Professor of Humanities Harold Bloom
Publisher : Infobase Publishing
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781438119274
Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of Carson McCullers.
Author : Ib Johansen
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 512 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2015-08-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789004303713
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 : Natsuo Kirino
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2007-03-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307267290
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 : Kathryn Hume
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2012-01-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780801462870
A frequent complaint against contemporary American fiction is that too often it puts off readers in ways they find difficult to fathom. Books such as Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, and Don DeLillo's Underworld seem determined to upset, disgust, or annoy their readers—or to disorient them by shunning traditional plot patterns and character development. Kathryn Hume calls such works "aggressive fiction." Why would authors risk alienating their readers—and why should readers persevere? Looking beyond the theory-based justifications that critics often provide for such fiction, Hume offers a commonsense guide for the average reader who wants to better understand and appreciate books that might otherwise seem difficult to enjoy. In her reliable and sympathetic guide, Hume considers roughly forty works of recent American fiction, including books by William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Chuck Palahniuk, and Cormac McCarthy. Hume gathers "attacks" on the reader into categories based on narrative structure and content. Writers of some aggressive fictions may wish to frustrate easy interpretation or criticism. Others may try to induce certain responses in readers. Extreme content deployed as a tactic for distancing and alienating can actually produce a contradictory effect: for readers who learn to relax and go with the flow, the result may well be exhilaration rather than revulsion.
