Grotesque Imagery Research Articles

Grotesque and transformative practices: a new understanding of transformational festival experience

ABSTRACT Unconventional expression styles in transformational festivals closely link to personal transformation. However, existing research has mainly focused on exploring the environmental factors that stimulate unconventional self-expression, neglecting the process through which individuals achieve personal transformation via such expressions. This study addresses this theoretical gap by investigating how individuals achieve personal transformation through unconventional self-expression, using Burning Man as a case study. Specifically, the study utilises visual materials from Burning Man's official Instagram account and applies Bakhtin's analysis of grotesque imagery to probe the link between unconventional self-expression and personal transformation. The findings indicate that personal transformation occurs through continuous transformative practices within unconventional self-expression, encompassing both external and internal transformation. Furthermore, personal transformation thrives on collective participation, enabling individuals to cultivate their unique transformation style within the collective landscape of transformative practices. The study contributes to a new theoretical understanding of transformational festivals by exploring the pathways to personal transformation through unconventional self-expression. It also presents an innovative application of Bakhtin's theory of grotesque in this context, adding to the existing body of knowledge. Additionally, practical recommendations for festival organizers are made to enhance participants' festival experiences and foster their personal transformation.

The Art of Gothic Literature: An Analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

This article examines Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as an example of Gothic literature. The author analyzes the novel's themes, characters, and literary devices to explore how Shelley uses Gothic elements to create a complex and emotionally resonant work. The article also delves into the historical and cultural context in which the novel was written, highlighting the influence of Romanticism and Enlightenment philosophy. Ultimately, the article argues that Frankenstein is a masterpiece of Gothic literature that continues to captivate readers and inspire new interpretations. In "The Art of Gothic Literature: An Analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," the author examines Shelley's famous novel and its contribution to the Gothic literary tradition. The article explores the novel's themes, including the dangers of scientific progress, the limits of human knowledge, and the consequences of playing god. The author also analyzes the novel's structure, characterization, and use of symbolism, highlighting the ways in which Shelley draws upon Gothic conventions while also subverting them. Ultimately, the article argues that Frankenstein remains a powerful and influential work of Gothic literature that continues to captivate readers more than two centuries after its publication. This article analyzes Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein" through the lens of gothic literature. The author explores how Shelley incorporates various gothic elements such as supernatural occurrences, grotesque imagery, and emotional intensity to create a dark and unsettling atmosphere. The article also delves into the themes of the novel, including the dangers of playing god and the isolation and alienation experienced by the creature. Through a close reading of the text, the author highlights the literary techniques that Shelley employs to convey these themes and to create a timeless work of gothic literature. Ultimately, the article argues that "Frankenstein" remains a relevant and powerful example of the gothic genre due to its ability to evoke fear, explore complex themes, and showcase the artistry of its author.

Carnivalesque Humour in the 2017 Women’s March Protest Posters Against Trumpism: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis

The 2017 Women's March is a histo-political icon in the US for women's rights, voice, solidarity, collective identity and power to resist Trump’s ideologized masculinity, racism and social hegemony. Although the multitude of protest posters in the Women’s March has become the core of research from different perspectives, there is still a scarce attention given to how Trump’s body compared to Putin’s was used to ridicule Trumpism through protestors’ multimodal protest posters. To cover such a research gap, this work, in turn, focuses mainly on grotesque imagery in the 2017 Women’s March for protesters to delegitimize and scorn Trump’s political agenda for ‘America First’ and ‘Make America Great Again’. Based on Bakhtin’s (1984a) carnival theory and carnivalesque as an overarching theoretical framework and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) visual social semiotics as a methodological approach to the selected protest posters corpus, we found that a multimodal grotesque imagery of the Trump-Putin’s relationship was manipulated in the 2017 Women’s March as a counter discourse to vent protesters’ anger and resistance against Trumpism. A work like this will significantly add more to sociolinguistics and political linguistics in terms of considering linguistic and nonlinguistic units in communication. As such, this implies broadening the toolkit of analysis in applied linguistics.

Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis: A Testimony to Life in the Margins

Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis focuses an expository spotlight on the marginalized voices that proliferate in large metropolises and that have been, to a large extent, imperceptible to mainstream academe. Thayil depicts the history of a section of Bombay’s underbelly that was an important nerve center in the drug business before the city’s name change to Mumbai. Although the great variety of drugs described in the novel helps set the overall tone, its diagnostic focus is on the people and on the motives behind their particular life choices. Thayil presents the haunting reality of the life of marginalized and oppressed individuals through the use of raw, grotesque imagery. Given Thayil’s approach to his subject, this paper aims to analyze Narcopolis’ composition and characters with the objective of locating Bakhtinian tropes of carnivalesque and grotesque realism. Another point of inquiry is Thayil’s use of an experimental language that mixes words from diverse vernaculars spoken in Bombay, a practice that adds a charge of authenticity to the narrative’s realist complexion. With Thayil’s debut novel becoming a voice for the voiceless, this paper explores his rendition of how people survive in the margins, largely concealed from critical scrutiny.

Lamentations by a Jewish poet on his skin affliction: Solomon Ibn Gabirol

Solomon Ibn Gabirol was a highly respected medieval Jewish poet and philosopher who lived in Spain. He suffered from a distressing, chronic cutaneous disorder of unknown etiology, which he poetically portrays in his poetry by using fantastic and grotesque imagery derived from Biblical sources. This contribution provides examples of Ibn Gabirol's remarkable poetry, which spotlights the immense human suffering and misery that can result from skin diseases.

Emotional Cues’ Effects on Grotesque Advertising

A growing literature is examining the potential of grotesque advertising. The aim of this study is to examine whether curiosity or boredom cues in a grotesque advertisement are more effective at enhancing brand attitude and how this effect is moderated by consumers’ construal level. Across three experimental studies, this research shows that a curiosity cue will be more effective among consumers with a high construal level, whereas a boredom cue will be more effective among consumers with a low construal level (Study 1 and an ancillary study, Study 2). Further, perceived fit (based on construal level) mediates these effects (Study 2). This study thus offers a fresh theoretical viewpoint on the efficacy of emotional advertising cues in enhancing consumer evaluations of grotesque advertising by investigating the moderating role of consumers’ construal level. These findings benefit marketers in developing effective advertising strategies featuring grotesque imagery.

Carson’s Can of Worms: Grotesque Satire and Abjection in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was a watershed moment for the modern environmental movement, and it is now a foundational twentieth-century environmental literature text. While Silent Spring had a good deal of success in galvanizing 1960s readers against DDT, some of Carson’s rhetoric now reads as moralistic and proselytizing. Current scholars criticize these modes of language, prolific in environmental writing, as alienating or overwhelming to prospective environmentalists seeking to understand the realities of global environmental crises.1 Carson’s earnest tone in Silent Spring is well documented, yet she uses a diverse range of tactics, and her use of satirical strategies—those of irony, irreverence, abjection, and grotesque imagery—remains less considered. I suggest these satirical portions of Carson’s text fit into an archive of what Nicole Seymour identifies as “bad environmentalisms.” Seymour defines “bad environmentalism” as “environmental thought that employs dissident, often-denigrated affects and sensibilities to reflect critically on both...

Gogol’s traditions in V. Kaverin’s novel “The Troublemaker, or Evenings on Vasilyevsky Island”

The novel The Troublemaker, or Evenings on Vasilyevsky Island by V. Kaverin is one of the most representative manifestations of the Russian Hoffmanian of the 1920s, as evidenced by the grotesque imagery of the novel. The very understanding of the grotesque is not limited to the Bakhtin theory, but implies a reference to the works of V. Kaiser and V. Shklovsky. Besides, it is suggested that the Saint Petersburg theme, which is relevant to the writer, is being developed under the banner of the formalist concept of literary life, as well as other ideas and theories of Russian formalism (including the theory of alienation). Kaverin succeeds in putting not only literature itself into the context of the Saint Petersburg myth, but also literature studies, which makes it possible to talk about the work as one of the brightest embodiments of the philological novel, the most important characteristic of which is the accentuated intertextual beginning. The work asserts that motives and themes, images and details, syntactic constructions, and even a composition (including a chronotope) of V. Kaverins first novel fits into Gogols system of coordinates. The Kaverins text is a construction assembled from fragments and details of Gogols text according to Gogols own rules.

The Grotesque and Obscene in post-Cold War Africa: Mbembe and the Child Soldier Novel

This article applies Achille Mbembe's formulations of the grotesque and the obscene to Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma's widely-read child soldier novel Allah n'est pas obligé (2000), highlighting under-examined aspects of Kourouma's prose style and political commentary. While critics have focused on the novel as a fictionalized description of a child soldier's experience in 1990s West Africa, a close reading of the text reveals Kourouma's preoccupation with the origins and composition of post-Cold War African political organization. The article reads Kourouma's use of obscenity and grotesque imagery through a Mbembian lens, revealing a continuity between the Cold-War era power structures that Mbembe describes in his essays and the post-Cold War political landscape in which the plot of Kourouma's novel plays out. By applying Mbembe's idea of 'illicit cohabitation' to Kourouma, the article reveals the transnational applicability of Mbembe's writing on the 'postcolony', while also highlighting the previously unexamined ways in which Kourouma satirizes his Western readership. Ultimately, the ability of Mbembe's terminology to reveal previously unexamined depths of a much-discussed and celebrated novel such as Allah n'est pas obligé shows the continued relevance of his thought to our understanding of contemporary Africa and the icons which mediate its image both within the continent and beyond.

"Up Close and Intimate": Catharsis, the Dark Side of Sexuality, and The Dresden Dolls

The Dresden Dolls are a punk-cabaret band that use their music to delve into diverse and taboo subject matter including sexual assault, abortion, and trauma. Despite the morose and grotesque imagery invoked by their lyrics, this paper advocates for the therapeutic effects of catharsis as encouraged by The Dresden Dolls. This essay provides an overview of the applications of catharsis in the arts and psychotherapy, explores how the musical elements and performance contexts of punk-cabaret elicit catharsis, and develops a contemporary theory of catharsis as it pertains to the music of The Dresden Dolls. In considering manifestations of trauma and healing in the songs “Missed Me,” “Mandy Goes to Med School,” and “Lonesome Organist Rapes Page Turner,” this paper illustrates how, despite the potential challenges of confronting trauma through music, the approach of The Dresden Dolls is ultimately effective in cultivating catharsis and encouraging healing for their listeners.

Beyond alternative: Michael DeForge and the new grotesque

ABSTRACT This article compares the grotesque imagery of contemporary comic artist Michael DeForge with the art of earlier underground and alternative artists, including Robert Crumb and Julie Doucet. Drawing upon Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject to characterise DeForge’s disturbing imagery, the article contends that his grotesque imagery blurs the line between the subject and the other. Whereas earlier alternative artists used the grotesque to subvert mainstream aesthetic sensibilities and deliver social commentary, DeForge’s art encourages the reader to reflect upon broader themes of identity and alienation. These contrasting applications of the grotesque arise from the changing relationship between alternative comic artists and an increasingly nebulous mainstream.

Barnet som instrument: Kritik av titoistisk diskurs i Aleksandar Hemons »Islands» och Alma Lazarevskas »Blagdan krunice»

Abstract: The Child as an Instrument: Criticism of Titoist Discourse in Aleksandar Hemon’s ‘Islands’ and Alma Lazarevska’s ‘Blagdan krunice’Especially since the war in the 1990s, much Bosnian-Herzegovinian fiction has employed the perspective of the child in order to express criticism of dominant ideological narratives. This article views the child figure as a political device that exposes the mechanisms of certain dominant discourses and that offers new, deviating angles on well-established conceptions within these discourses. The analysis of Alexander Hemon’s short story ‘Islands’ (2000) stresses the grotesque imagery associated with the perception of the boy narrator as a way of ‘unlearning’ notions of Yugoslav modernity as idyllic, even paradisiac. And in Alma Lazarevska’s 2003 ‘Blagdan krunice’ (The Feast of the Rosary) the focus is not so much on the perspective of the boy protagonist as on his function as an arena for projecting narratives of the heroic soldier on the threshold between Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav discourse.

Laughter as a direction of Marc-André Hamelin’s composer searches.

Laughter as a direction of Marc-André Hamelin’s composer searches.

Peter Howson and the Language of Salvation

Abstract Since his conversion to Christianity in 2001, Peter Howson’s religious paintings have generally been met with critical incomprehension. A case in point was his 2012 exhibition Redemption, where reviewers suggested an irreconcilable incongruity between its grotesque imagery and redemption, the exhibition’s title. In response to this critical bewilderment, the present article argues for the appropriateness of the grotesque in Howson’s depictions of salvation by examining the significance of his conversion experience and providing a more sophisticated and developed analysis of the grotesque as his visual language. More specifically, it utilizes insights from an analysis of the content and practice of the artist’s belief system and a new taxonomy of the grotesque in a close reading of the Hades cycle, featured in Howson’s Redemption exhibition, in order to show how the artist communicates salvation through the grotesque. It is hoped that this article may serve as useful groundwork for other scholars engaging with Howson’s extraordinary religious art.

Grotesque imagery enhances the persuasiveness of luxury brand advertising

The current research empirically documents grotesque imagery’s positive effect on the persuasiveness of luxury brand advertising, and examines the perceived fit between grotesque imagery and luxury branding as the psychological mechanism underlying that effect. The results of two studies showed that grotesque imagery in advertisements for luxury products enhanced consumers’ brand experiences and increased their purchase intentions by transporting them to the narratives portrayed in the ads. This process was driven by the perceived fit between grotesque imagery and luxury branding, which leads to fluent processing, thereby facilitating transportation to the ad. This research presents clear evidence that grotesque ads can effectively influence consumers when they are used to promote luxury brands.

General Editor's Introduction to Volume 13

General Editor's Introduction to Volume 13

House of Cards

This essay turns a depth-psychological lens upon the drug abuse, sexual manipulation, and murder scenes in the American television rendition of House of Cards. The Underwoods, who are obsessed with power, yet strangely enticing, invite the viewer to upend their moralistic perspective challenging notions of innocence and evil. By applying post-Freudian Lacan’s Phallus theory, the unconscious and persistent desire for power in some individuals is explored. Then, in a move toward understanding why audiences flock to such grotesque imagery, post-Jungian Moore’s notion of dark eros is extended to argue for the necessity of accepting the sadistic aspect of psyche. The notion of libertine consciousness is used to illuminate why the darkness draws us in even as it is repulsive and suggest the cautious, reflective digestion of these grotesque images as a creative action for those challenged by current political darkness. Bringing Lacan and Moore into dialogue, it is suggested that sexually toned darkness may necessarily balance the pull toward light aspects of psyche. Through close reading, intense scenes are reimagined as more than just Jungian shadow material. They also illustrate the sacrifice of innocence required as one attempts to increase consciousness.

Butoh Medea

Butoh Medea Sidney Homan (bio) The New York Premier of Butoh Medea: Spanning Cultures, Media, and Ages When a work of art—a play by Shakespeare, for example—is translated into another medium and that medium itself comes from a different culture, there is a double potential for profit or loss. Does the translation offer a perspective on the original, confirming or even bringing to the surface what we sense in the original work? Conversely, does the new media draw too much attention to itself, subordinating or even subverting the original work? The phrase "as inspired by" can be a sign of respect or an unconscious admission of guilt. When Euripedes' play Medea was translated into Butoh, the wordless Japanese "dance of darkness" that grew out of the suffering from Hiroshima, both the artists involved and their audiences clearly profited. Starring the exquisite actor/dancer Yokko, who adapted and choreographed the show (written and further adapted by Sean Michael Welch), and directed by Brian Rhinehart, Butoh Medea had its world premiere in 2014 at the United Solo Theatre Festival in New York at Theatre Row. It was later staged around the world—Edinburgh, Scotland, Turin, Italy, Izmir, Turkey, Warsaw, Poland, as well as around the United States. It won awards at the United Solo Festival for choreography, costume and lighting design, and was named "The Best One-Woman Show." A response to the pain and suffering not only of Hiroshima but of subsequent events, Butoh has what Jeff Goldberg calls "aesthetics that are sometimes so distorted and strange," with the performers moving "awkwardly and slowly with shuffling steps"—like zombies. Margarett Loke notes that Butoh has "aesthetic features that go against the western archetypes of perfection and beauty." It deals with taboo topics like "death, eroticism, and sex," and the dance is often set in extreme or absurd environments, characterized by slow, hyper-controlled motion, almost nude bodies, up-rolled eyes with contorted faces, inward rotated legs and feet, fetal positions, and playful or grotesque imagery. Dancer Yokko and Director Rhinehart transform into the medium of Butoh the story of Medea, a barbarian princess who marries Jason, a man who in turn abandons her to marry the Glauce, Creon's daughter. In revenge, Medea murders the children she had with Jason as well as his new wife. For Yokko, the important thing was not what Medea did but what made her do it. For her, Medea's actions were not premeditated, and so Yokko's concern was to make her human—quite against the traditional image of Medea as a woman scorned, a lost soul who commits infanticide. Yokko focused on Medea's inner struggles, and hence her aim was to translate Euripides' text ("an inspiration," in her words) into physical movements ranging from dance to the manipulation of her body, bringing to the surface without words what her character is feeling. For her, Medea's obscene act is inseparable from her grief, her love of Jason that is itself distorted by how he cruelly devalues her, and—yes—her love and compassion for her children. Yokko tells of a special moment in rehearsal when her director put his face close to hers and said, "YOU GOTTA LOVE YOUR CHILDREN" with tears in his eyes. Harold Pinter speaks of subtext as the "weasel under the cocktail cabinet," an unseen creature there who nevertheless affects how the actor, pulling a bottle out of that cabinet, delivers his or her lines. In this light, Yokko brought that weasel to the surface—physically and graphically. Sound effects, designed by Yokko, complemented this physical subtext. As she defines it in her notes, the two major contrastive sound elements were fire and water—fire representing masculine "passion, will" and water, women's "emotion and creativity." Together, they created "the atmosphere for the audience to experience the mind of Medea." There were other contrastive sounds, such as those for the island where she was born and the city where she now lives in "a cell, prison-like." Sound could suggest dialogue: At one point, the sound of rain transforms "into buzzing human sounds of women, blaming Medea," the buzzing "dialogue" then replaced by "sharp uncomfortable sounds...

From Fecal Briquettes to Candy Kremlins: The Edible Ideal in Sorokin's Prose

This article examines contemporary Russian postmodernist author Vladimir Sorokin's use of food thematics primarily in works written since the year 2000. Sorokin is perhaps best known for his signature technique of using grotesque sexual or violent imagery to parody the truth claims of various kinds of discourse, whether ideological, religious, or aesthetic. However, in a number of works, beginning with his first novel, The Norm (1983–87), and extending up to such recent short novels such as Day of an Oprichnik (2006) and Candy Kremlin (2008), Sorokin employs food imagery to critique the push for extreme ideological and social cohesion at the heart of Russia's re-embrace of nationalism and empire in the twenty-first century. The author also employs a broad array of food/eating images to critique the country's long-standing tradition of consuming utopian ideologies—from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the nineteenth century to Putinism in the twenty-first.

Discordia Concors and Bidirectionality: Embodied Cognition in John Donne's Songs and Sonnets

In the introduction to his 1912 edition of John Donne's poetry, Herbert J. C. Grierson writes of “the vein of sheer ugliness which runs through his work, presenting details that seem merely and wantonly repulsive.” What is more, Donne displays what Samuel Johnson argues is “a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images.” Through both a cognitive-literary and an empirical study of the metaphors in Donne's poems “The Bait” and “The Flea,” the authors discuss the grotesque nature of his poetic imagery as constituting “a clash of incompatibles, generated by the great distance between the two semantic fields.” The authors argue that it is this clash that sustains bidirectionality in a metaphor, by preserving the tension between its two subjects, while allowing each to alternatively become the focus of one's attention while reading. Donne's use of grotesque imagery thereby juxtaposes semantic fields and their worlds with frightening consequences, and this impacts upon the bidirectionality inherent in the process of metaphor comprehension. Furthermore, this essay will show how the poetic texts enable both embodied simulation and bodily feeling, both of which manifest embodied cognition in the reader; the authors therefore argue that Donne is, in fact, an early advocate of embodied cognition.