Grotesque Body Research Articles

“Be Yo’self. It’s Just a Show”: Performing Community through the Comic Grotesque in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors

Abstract Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play Neighbors, which premiered at the Public Theater in 2010, explores the history of Black representation in the theater and, subsequently, the performance of Black identity in the US through its depiction of a complex and contradictory minstrelsy that cannot easily be classified as satirical or subversive. Generating what Jacobs-Jenkins has called “wrong laughter” through contradiction, ambiguity, and ambivalence, Neighbors engages the unstable space of the comic grotesque in order to open up pathways for something new to emerge. In this play, the figure of the clown – a grotesque outlaw who moves between, within, across, and beyond boundaries – becomes a key destabilizing figure as the grotesque body becomes a site for transformation through its contradictions, oozing inconsistency and excess, and allowing a potential space for regeneration and renewal through instability and failure when the stable and the rational have failed. In its embrace of clowning and the comic grotesque, Neighbors questions the stable notion of “community,” particularly in terms of racial and historical identity, and exposes the contradictions of closed constructions, creating a space beyond the boundaries of rational discourse that may begin to engage a more complex reality.

Sessiz Ev'in Çok Sesliliğinde Groteskin Sesini Duymak

ABSTRACT Having placed postmodern techniques at the basis of his works, Orhan Pamuk frequently benefited from these techniques in his second novel, Silent House, published in 1983. In this sense, the concept of polyphony, in which the narration is made through various sources rather than a single source, stands out in the novel. Polyphony enables the text to have a multi-layered quality; the narrator constantly changes within the text, thus the novel takes on a varied structure, as in Mikhail Bahtin’s concept of carnival. Moreover, this carnivalesque structure is supported by the descriptions of the summer house, which forms the main place of the text, and the events experienced by the three generations who came together in this house. On the other hand, in order to diversify the carnival, Pamuk also included the grotesque body, which is an integral part of it. The grotesque body, pushed out of society and condemned to live with the misfortune of its deformity, stands right next to the sublime, turning the text inquestion into a carnival venue. Based on this, this study will examine the position of the grotesque body in Silent House and its function within the text.

The Sacred, the Profane, and Frida Kahlo: A Religious Worldview in the Grotesque Body

RESUMO O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar, sob a perspectiva bakhtiniana, a construção grotesca do corpo fridiano por meio de uma cosmovisão religiosa. Para tanto, são analisados dois autorretratos produzidos pela pintora mexicana Frida Kahlo, levando em consideração as relações dialógicas construídas entre as representações grotescas e as simbologias católicas. Nos enunciados analisados, nos quais são depreendidas as especificidades da competência criativa da autora-criadora em sua atividade estética, percebe-se o correlacionamento entre a pintura El venado herido e a narrativa do santo católico São Sebastião e o diálogo entre a tela Las dos fridas e a imagem do Sagrado Coração de Jesus.

Shit happens on the big screen: faecal motifs in contemporary film

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyse various excremental motifs and their functions in selected contemporary films. Drawing on concepts such as Julia Kristeva’s abject, Mary Douglas’s taboo and Mikhail Bakhtin’s grotesque body, the authors demonstrate that dirt in the form of excrement holds metaphorical and symbolic potential in cinematic representations. Faecal tropes selected for discussion range from the use of excrement as a means of humiliation (The Help, Green Book, Kornblumenblau) or resistance (Silent Grace, Hunger) to an understanding of defecation as an ideal and peaceful act (Jarhead, Halkaa) or as a trigger for culturally conditioned disgust (Death at a Funeral, Daddy Day Care), to the use of faecal matters as a demarcation line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the world of the future (Uncanny, The Platform) or as a productive substance entangled with multiple life forms (The Martian). Since filmic texts can be regarded as a taxonomic representing of faecal motifs that have received considerably little scholarly attention, the discussed examples do not exhaust the topic, but lay the foundation for more detailed analysis in the future.

Grotesque bodies in the book of Job: A psychoanalytic perspective

Job is suffering from illness without understanding it. His impairment and exclusion render him disabled in an abled, gloating but threatened society for which he is the laughing stock despite his exceptional piety. His psychic and spiritual breakthrough comes when God makes him reflect on and in the mirror of the wild and disorderly bodies of the two monstrosities, Behemoth and Leviathan, elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible exemplifying chaos, but now unexpectedly celebrated. Even as possible relief thanks to light-hearted humour these grotesque bodies emancipate the object of body-politics by subverting the centre of certainty and power. In this study the Bakhtinian critique of the ‘monologisation’ of the human body and its experience promised to be fruitfully combined with psychoanalytic insights about imprisoned body-images to enrich the relevance of the book of Job.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The interface of biblical hermeneutics and exegesis with other research fields in the social sciences and humanities such as psychoanalytic theory and literary criticism expanded the horizon of insight for all parties involved, not only for biblical studies.

Grotesque Realism and Grotesque Body in Bakhtin

RESUMO Nesse artigo, discutiremos os conceitos bakhtinianos de realismo grotesco e corpo grotesco a partir de diferentes aspectos, a começar pelas abordagens sincrônicas feitas pelos linguistas e semióticos contemporâneos nossos, mas também pela abordagem que o próprio Bakhtin fez desses conceitos desde a pré-história deles, isto é, enquanto o pensador russo elaborava-os em sua tese de doutorado, no contexto da União Soviética na primeira metade do século XX. Depois disso, discutiremos o significado de ambos os conceitos no interior da obra A cultura popular na Idade Média e no Renascimento: O contexto de François Rabelais e, por fim, examinaremos algumas manifestações do grotesco em obras literárias e de artes plásticas do judaísmo antigo e do cristianismo antigo e medieval, as quais foram direta ou indiretamente citadas ou aludidas por Bakhtin.

Realismo grotesco e corpo grotesco em Bakhtin

ABSTRACT In this article, we will discuss the Bakhtinian concepts of Grotesque realism and grotesque body from various perspectives. We will begin by exploring the synchronic approaches taken by contemporary linguists and semioticians. Additionally, we will delve into Bakhtin’s own treatment of these concepts, tracing their origins to his doctoral thesis during the early 20th century within the context of the Soviet Union. Subsequently, we will examine the significance of both concepts within the work Rabelais and His World, Finally, we will scrutinize some instances of the Grotesque in literary and visual arts from Ancient Judaism and early in Medieval Christianity, which were either directly or indirectly referenced by Bakhtin.

Elements of Horror, Grotesque Bodies, and the Fragmentation of Identity in Mark Shelley’s Frankenstein

Gothic books emphasise the occult and the strange. Old buildings (especially castles or apartments with secret passageways), dungeons, or towers serve as the backdrop for the enigmatic events in Gothic literature. Obviously, ghost stories are a well-known form of Gothic fiction. In addition, distant locales that appear strange to the reader serve as part of the setting of a Gothic tale. Even the idea of resurrecting the dead is horrifying. Mark Shelley makes full use of this literary trick to heighten the eerie sentiments generated by Frankenstein in the reader. The idea of resurrecting the dead would have caused the typical reader to recoil in horror and unbelief.

Disabled Bodies in Korean Fictions in the 1970s: The Dwarf and “Young-ja’s Heyday”

The modernization’s intervention with human bodies around the 1970s in Korea is epitomized in Cho Se-hui’s The Dwarf and Cho Sunjak’s “Young-ja’s Heyday.” In The Dwarf, the protagonist as Other represents the powerless low classes, especially manual labourers. Utilized like mechanical tools, his grotesque body is reified. Having lost one arm while working as a labourer,

The Aesthetic of Grotesque in Lu Yang’s Delusional Mandala and Delusional World

This article explores the aesthetic of the grotesque in Lu Yang’s recent work Delusional Mandala (2015) and Delusional World (2020). I argue that the aesthetic of the grotesque envisioned in these two works becomes a radical tool for the artist’s deconstruction and dismantling of the socially and culturally sanctioned boundaries of corporeality and normativity. My approach to Lu Yang’s aesthetic of the grotesque is based on Sara Cohen Shabot’s theorization of grotesque philosophy and the grotesque body as well on the concept of faciality proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Two questions guide my reflection and readings in this article: What are the characteristics of the grotesque aesthetic in Lu Yang’s films? In what ways does this aesthetic deconstruct concepts such as the human and normativity?

Gothic Politics in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013)

The present article examines a narrative of darkness to illuminate the rhetoric of haunting and monstrosity. Gothicity evokes a sense of indeterminateness and it dramatizes disruptive incorporeal occurrences as interrogated in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, a war Frankenfiction. It stages horror to chronicle national disintegration through the rise of a sewn-together zombie to mark the appalling arrival of the Iraqi dissenter. The new twenty-first-century monster is a zombie to defy marginality and to associate monstrosity with deviance and abnormality. Within this rationale, the present study investigates the aesthetics of Postcolonial Gothic politics to examine the use of the supernatural, the grotesque body, the monstrous abject, and the haunted ruins to depict a dismembered nation through the deployment of eerie motifs and surreal techniques. My premise fleshes out the Frankenstein hubris to dismantle the US political culture in Iraq. The aim is to reframe the modern Gothic monster as an emblem of reverse colonialism to defy the imperialist ideologies and to articulate past trauma through the rhetoric of bodily horror, haunting and ghostly fear.

Groteska kroppar i folkhemmets sverige

Grotesque bodies in the Swedish folkhem: Improper aesthetic and rhetoric in the magazine PUSS 1968–1974
 In an analysis of the Swedish satirical magazine PUSS (1968–1974) this article explores what is considered as improper rhetoric and aesthetic in the public sphere. It draws on theories of representation and the culture of carnival laughter and the grotesque as well as research on the Swedish folkhem and satire and democracies. I coin the concept demogrotesque-atic in order to capture how PUSS, by using comics, grotesque bodies and carnivalesque, improper rhetoric and aesthetics, makes visible fundamental challenges to democratic societies. I argue that the magazine’s representational practices highlight the function of what is often considered ‘filth’ in the public sphere and the central role the grotesque body plays in upholding – and breaking – boundaries of propriety. I interpret this as important democratic work, and demonstrate that while the satire in PUSS is situated in a specific time and place, it is also part of a longstanding literary and artistic tradition.

Lipski, Jakub. Painting the Novel: Pictorial Discourse in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction.

Lipski, Jakub. <i>Painting the Novel: Pictorial Discourse in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction</i>.

Writing the Grotesque in Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones"

In her work, Jesmyn Ward has revitalized the Southern Gothic tradition and its tropes to better reflect the realities of Black American life in the 21st century. This essay explores the reconfiguration of the grotesque body in Ward's sophomore novel, Salvage the Bones, which follows an impoverished Black family in Mississippi in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. In contrast to her literary predecessors, Ward defines the grotesque as a state of debility imposed on Black bodies and then deemed uniquely problematic to them as a class and race, rather than the result of centuries of structural oppression. As such, she understands the trope as encompassing far more than bodily or intellectual difference, the way in which it was previously utilized by Southern writers like William Faulkner and Carson McCullers. Instead, Ward theorizes the grotesque as a biopolitical state, in which populations that do not conform to the status quo, and specifically the dominant capitalist mode of production and consumption, are driven to the margins and their lives deemed expendable.

Grotesque Metamorphoses and Creative Practices in Jan Svankmajer

This paper explores stop motion puppetry films through the lens of the grotesque, to see how this aesthetic category helps in understanding the medium and its appeals. Noel Carroll describes the grotesque as, a “departure from the ordinary” whereas Wolfgang Kayser tries to explain its nature as that of an “estranged world”. The animated works of pioneering filmmaker Jan Svankmajer have been pivotal when it comes to visual manifestations of hybrid forms and the formation of illusory supernatural life by merging objects of animate and inanimate simulacra. I will discuss in which ways the grotesque is portrayed in Svankmajer’s films by examining manifestations of grotesque in the bodies of the puppets as well as in the filmmaker’s creative process. When going into a more in-depth analysis, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘grotesque body’ and its relationship to the earth as an unfinished metamorphosis of existence and Wolfgang Kayser’s writings on the grotesque as an alienated world created through the practices of the artist will also be used to identify how Svankmajer mixes and alters the biological and ontological categories of everyday objects.

The Beard as Spectacle and Scandal in a Thirteenth-century Hebrew Maqāma

Abstract The Eighth Maqāma by Yaʿacov ben Elʿazar (Toledo, ca. 1200) tells the story of ʿAkhbor, a bearded beggar-preacher who is revealed to be rich and lecherous. His sexual preference for a black maid leads his four white/Arab maids to murder him viciously, but not before taking revenge on his beard. In fact, the most notable feature of the false preacher is his gargantuan beard, which occupies a full one-third of the maqāma, and other beards are also excessively described. Following Robert Bartlett, I will relate to the beard as “social text” and explore its abundant symbolical meanings within the surrounding cultures of Islam and Judaism, as well as against the backdrop of Iberian contemporary society. Further, in order to better understand Ben Elʿazar’s manipulation of both the beard and the genre, as well as his emphasis on sexual, anal and scatological humor, I will have recourse to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical discussions of “the grotesque body,” “the carnivalesque,” and to his generic model of the Mennipea.

La via delle mascherine

In questo articolo mi concentrerò sul ruolo delle mascherine facciali, resesinecessarie in tutto il mondo a causa della pandemia da Coronavirus del 2020, e trasformatesiin indumento alla moda. Inquadrerò la funzione delle mascherine nell’ambito del concettoantropologico (Lévi-Strauss), sociologico e semiotico della maschera, e le analizzeròin relazione all’immagine del corpo grottesco (Bakhtin). Partirò da una definizione dellamoda come sistema di segni (Barthes) e dalla riflessione su come i segni della moda contemporaneaesprimano in modo spiccato le aperture del corpo e le inversioni semantichecaratteristiche dello stile grottesco. La funzione protettiva delle mascherine, cioè quella diimpedire le aperture e le contaminazioni tra i corpi, caratteristiche del grottesco in sensobachtiniano, viene ad essere però semioticamente “contesa” proprio dal divenire di modadi questi oggetti, che assumono colori, fantasie, forme, dimensioni, affidate all’inventivastilistica e alla creatività più sfrenata, anche personale. Le mascherine alla moda diventanocosì il simbolo dell’epoca del Coronavirus in quanto oggetti che “resistono” idealmentealla separazione tra i corpi imposta dal distanziamento sociale, e al tempo stesso interpretanoin forma emblematica l’idea di responsabilità solidale e collettiva dei corpi rivestiti,anche oltre la pandemia.

Consumption and the Indian Diaspora: A Study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

For the diaspora, consumption remains a significant exercise, as it acts as a means of appropriation of the host land, while also being an agency of assimilation and categorisation. Moreover, the fact remains that consumption or eating simultaneously entails regeneration and violence. As such, this paper justifies how the locus of consumption is multifaceted, being not only physical, but also metaphorical, and at times hyperreal, whereby the diaspora exists not only as consumers, but also as an item of consumption by the hosts. For this purpose, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) has been analysed through the methodology of close reading, to present how food and its narrative is used as a repetitive metaphor and an ideological implement, which further illuminates the technicalities of consumption among the Indian diaspora. To set the stage, this paper briefly summarises the development of food studies as a genre, which has successfully enlarged the scope of literary criticism and research. Theoretically, this paper draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s discourse of food and eating as presented in his work Rabelais and His World (1965). By examining the unifying trope of food, this paper attempts to study the numerous dichotomies between the diasporic body and the concept of the grotesque body, as put forward by Bakhtin. This paper also attends to the concept of “culinary citizenship” (Mannur, 2010, p. 20) and traces the way it is overturned in favour of culinary “interorientation” (Bakhtin, 1965/1984, p. 317).

Negotiating Existential Concerns of Death and Meaninglessness through the Grotesque in Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost

Grotesque and existentialism in the field of literature generally raise four points. On the one hand, the grotesque has always been associated with negative connotation elements that usually include deformity, death, violence or monstrosity. In fact, the grotesque often carries pejorative connotations for it challenges traditions and deviates from what is accepted as the norm. On the other hand, existentialism, traced way back to as early as the 19 th century, often question the meaning of life and struggle with the anxiety of death while constantly looking for ways to justify one’s existence in a world that is filled with pessimism. Thus, this paper aims to find a point of convergence between existentialism and the grotesque by primarily focusing on how the male protagonist, Sir Simon in Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost employs the grotesque as a way to deal with existential concerns as pointed out by Irvin Yalom namely death, meaninglessness, freedom and existential isolation with an emphasis on the first two concerns. Three grotesque elements, specifically, Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, Thomson’s exaggeration, and Kohut’s narcissism will be studied alongside the two existential concerns, death and meaninglessness. By focusing on grotesque and existential elements, the paper will illustrate how the male protagonist is able to rely on the grotesque to subdue his fear and terror brought upon by the existential concerns in order to justify his sense of existence. Keywords: Oscar Wilde; Existential Concerns; Carnivalesque; Grotesque Body; Extravagance

‘The new messiah of the battlefields’: The Body as Discursive Strategy in Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun

This article discusses the discursive significance of the body in Dalton Trumbo’s classic anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1939). With its political rants, depictions of working-class life, symbolic imagery, and vivid descriptions of the dismembered torso of its protagonist, the human body emerges in Trumbo’s novel as our primary vehicle for being-in-the-world, as well as the figurative weight that grounds us in it. Following this logic, human freedom and autonomy appear to be curtailed by our own corporeal limitations, coupled with our involvement in a world of oppressive hierarchal systems and reified social relations. Building on the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukàcs and others, this study reveals a dialectic at work within Johnny between what can best be described as the phenomenal, reified, and grotesque bodies. While the phenomenal body of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology emphasizes relative autonomy and embodied subjectivity, the reified body represents humankind in a completely objectified state. My analysis illustrates how Trumbo’s text creates a tension between these two conceptions of being, while employing grotesque realism—a subversive literary mode utilizing the degraded image of the body—to inspire change in the real world.