Grotesque Realism Research Articles

Lu Xun and Modernism/Postmodernism

Although Lu Xun (1881–1936) produced all his literary works in a period that coincided with the heyday of Western modernism (1910–30), scholars both inside and outside China have made few attempts to study them in the international context of the modernist movement. Because of Lu Xun's concern with the fate of the Chinese nation and his professed intention to be its spiritual physician, critical opinion holds that his writings are primarily political and cultural in thematics and realistic in formal representation. The scholarly consensus that he is a master of critical realism remains unchanged. However, Lu Xun's vision of literature and his writing techniques also draw on features common to symbolism, surrealism, supernatural realism, grotesque realism, magic realism, and other experimental forms. Since these are modernist, even postmodern, features, it would be of great interest to explore Lu Xun's relationship to the modernist movement that swept the West in the early twentieth century and the extent to which his writings anticipated postmodernism. I argue that his work should be viewed as a contribution to the international modernist movement from a non-Western, Third World country. Indeed, no history of international modernism is complete if it does not incorporate the incipient modernism that Lu Xun pioneered independently of the West.

Francis Parkman's grotesque body: Disease, disgust and desire in The Oregon Trail

This essay applies Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of carnival and grotesque realism to Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail. Tracing a journey from the civilized east to the uncivilized west, Parkman's narrative expresses a simultaneous fear and fascination towards the Otherness he encounters (and, indeed, constructs) that leads finally to the hybrid carnivalising of his own body. These deep-seated ambivalences in the west ultimately reveal much broader anxieties over social disorder prevalent in the urban east.

A (Feminist) Cultural Materialistic Approach to Shakespeare's Plays through Bakhtin's Discourse of the Grotesque Body: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Julius Caesar

'The essential principle of grotesque realism', Bakhtin writes, 'is degradation', but he is also insistent that this degradation is not merely a negative process. On the contrary, Bakhtin stresses the ambivalence of carnival imagery and its use in Rabelais. The degradation enacted in carnival and in carnivalized writing-the incessant reminders that we are all creatures of fresh and thus of fool and faeces also-this degradation is simultaneously an affirmation, for even 'excrement is gay matter', linked to regeneration and renewal. Related to this conception of grotesque realism is distinction hat Bakhtin draws between the 'grotesque body' and the 'classic body'. This is another of his evaluatively charged distinctions, and, like all of his aesthetic preferences, is linked to some of his profoundest philosophical predispositions. Where the body of classical art is an achieved and completed thing, the grotesque body of Rabelais and the kind of art which he represents appears unfinished a thing of buds and sprouts, the orifices evident through which it sucks in and expels the world. The grotesque body celebrated by Bakhtin is a body in which becoming rather than completion is evident, a body whose openness to the world and the future is emphatically symbolized by the consuming maws, pregnant stomachs, evident phalluses and gargantuan evacuations that make it up. Much of the bawdy humour in Romeo Gild Juliet revolves around the grotesque body. The Nurse seems to epitomize Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque, especially in her repeated allusions to copulation, conception, genitalia, and her own body. During the course of the play the Nurse seems to take a vicarious pleasure in anticipating Juliet's sexual encounters. Bakhtin argued that the grotesque mode could be used to counteract or undermine the status of the 'classical', high, or orthodox; it can puncture the gravity and grasp of dominant discourses and ideologies (systems of belief and expression). Applied to the Nurse, we might say that her discourse of sex challenges, and arguably undermines, the idealization of romantic love voiced by Lady Capulet (and indeed Juliet) and the notion that marriage is principally a status issue, voiced by Capulet. While the Capulets mask the presence of sexuality within marriage, the Nurse exposes it. But in the Dream, the ass's head distinguishes itself from comic props and animal masks in general, and becomes part of a complex structural pun, and the lower bodily parts are ennobled. Bottom is not only the bottom of the social hierarchy as the play represents it, but also the 'bottom' of the body when seated, literally the social or arse. Shakespeare and his contemporaries took for granted that ass, as the vulgar, dialectical spelling of arse, was the meeting point of a powerful set of linked concepts. Shakespeare used ass to pun on the that gets beaten with a stick and the arse that gets thumped sexually, the arse that bears or carries in intercourse. In Julius Caesar, the meaning of blood and bleeding becomes part of an insistent rhetoric of bodily conduct in which the bleeding body signifies as a shameful token of uncontrol, as a failure of physical self-mastery particularly associated with woman. The image of blood is interpreted as a trope of gender and the open and bleeding body of Caesar's corpse is associated with feminine blood. The Petrarchan vocabulary Antony deploys in signifying Caesar's corpse, first in the capitol and later in the forum, accedes to the idea of femaleness as a source of Caesar's difference but refigures his body as a discursive site not of contempt or anxiety but of desire.

“The Man for His Time” The Big Lebowski as Carnivalesque Social Critique

This essay explores the ability of carnivalesque rhetorical strategies to challenge hegemonic social hierarchies and the social order in general. Working through grotesque realism, the inversion of hierarchies, structural and grammatical experimentation and other tropes, the carnivalesque encourages audiences to achieve a critical distance through laughter and realize the constructed nature of the social world. In analyzing The Big Lebowski as a carnivalesque text, the film's critical stance becomes clear—it proposes an alternative worldview contrary to that which dominated the political and social landscapes of the United States at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991. The film encourages receptive audiences to question both the nature and the values of that social world, as well as their place in it. A “person's place” is thus revealed to be more of a malleable choice than a concrete dictate. However, because carnivalesque texts challenge the status quo (and are often offensive to dominant tastes and values), they tend to meet with denigration and derision. Such was the case with The Big Lebowski. By employing a carnivalesque lens and working against the grain of mainstream value systems, cultural critics can help to rescue such texts from pop culture oblivion (as Lebowski was by its cult-like following) and highlight their potential to help us realize more humane, more egalitarian, and more pacific ways of being and interacting in our communities.

A Carnivalesque Approach to the Politics of Consumption (or) Grotesque Realism and the Analytics of the Excretory Economy

Politics of consumption analyses often evince a moralistic subtext that traces to the nineteenth-century fusion of Calvinism and patriarchal sexual politics. This spermatic legacy has channeled these critical discourses in a therapeutic direction that attenuates their realpolitik relevance. Drawing from Bakhtin's account of the carnivalesque, the author argues for an analytics of the excretory economy that eschews therapeutic goals in favor of muckraking scholarship that critically analyzes specific market systems and their constitutive networks of power relationships and material consequences. The author concludes by discussing some ways in which muckraking scholarship can mobilize citizen-consumers to the activist cause of transforming structural conditions that render specific facets of commercial culture problematic.

O fétido odor da morte e os aromas da vida: poética dos saberes e processo sensorial entre os Piaroa da bacia do Orinoco

O povo piaroa, que vive às margens dos afluentes do Meio Orinoco, acredita que o movimento de todo processo corporal participa de uma ordem venenosa e primordial das coisas. Este texto explora a correspondência entre os processos sensoriais e cósmicos e as formas do povo piaroa pensar e praticar sua arte culinária. Realiza, assim, uma expedição à etnopoética. O artigo tratará da interação entre dois gêneros narrativos contrastantes o sublime e o realismo grotesco, tais como usados pelos cantadores xamânicos para revelar as múltiplas formas com que processos corporais e vida sensorial estão intimamente entrelaçados com os modos de conhecimento. A imagética do sublime evoca as belas faculdades sensuais da parte superior do corpo, enquanto a imagética do realismo grotesco trata das excreções venenosas e dos orifícios das partes baixas do corpo. Em ambos os gêneros, o processo corporal é um operador importante, mas muitas vezes ambíguo, tanto no domínio do conhecimento quanto na perda deste. Para os Piaroa, os modos de saber humanos estão sempre envolvidos com o que é tóxico e, portanto, atrelados aos processos geminados de degeneração e regeneração: o veneno, como agente de transformação, é criador da vida, mas também pode ser o seu algoz.

Heavy Metal Carnival and Dis‐alienation: The Politics of Grotesque Realism

Based on four years of concert fieldwork and extensive music media analysis (including bands such as Cradle of Filth, GWAR, Insane Clown Posse, Marilyn Manson, and Slipknot), this article shows how heavy metal music and its carnival culture express a dis‐alienating politics of resistance. Applying Bakhtin's multifaceted conceptualization of the carnival‐grotesque, the author explains how grotesque realism in metal music and performances constitutes a proto‐utopian liminal alternative to the impersonal, conformist, superficial, unequal, and numbing realities of commercialism and, more abstractly, a resistance to a society of spectacle and nothingness.

O humor rabelaisiano de Patrick Chamoiseau e Mário de Andrade

O objetivo deste artigo é fazer uma análise comparativa de dois romances, Macunaíma, de Mário de Andrade, e Chronique des sept misères, de Patrick Chamoiseau, a fim de rastrear os principais procedimentos usados, sobretudo os relativos ao realismo grotesco, que os inserem na grande tradição cômica e popular de Rabelais, tão bem estudada por Mikhaïl Bakhtin.

O rebaixamento corporal nas imagens midiáticas

This article provides a reading of grotesque shown in visual medias, mainly television. The discussion is supported by the ideas of bodily lower stratum as proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his work about popular culture at final Middle Ages and Renaissance, based on Francois Rabelais’s literary creations. The study explains the anthropological dimensions of the human body; defines the bodily lower stratum from the standpoint of bakhtinian thought; presents aspects of the mentality and the cultural scenario at the end of the medieval period, with emphasis on carnivalization and desacralization of the human body; and discusses the notions of renascentist grotesque realism updated in the context of contemporary mediatic images.

Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda: una crítica cervantina de la alegoresis emblemática

The relationship between the heterogeneous and episodic nature of Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda and the dominant religious and political discourses of baroque Spain is a recurring topic of discussion in Cervantes studies. The purpose of my inquiry is to further this discussion by focusing on Cervantes’ treatment of the body and its relation to the production of language and meaning. Specifically, I am interested in comparing Cervantes’ use of what Mikhail Bakhtin has termed grotesque realism with the baroque aesthetic and philosophy of desengaño. At issue is Cervantes’ use and critique of “the emblematic mode of representation,” in which the corpse often functions as an allegorical sign of failed human aspirations. Cervantes articulates an alternative aesthetic and moral enterprise to baroque desengaño and the emblem, by privileging and problematizing the relationship between language and the body, refusing, in effect, to discard the grotesque body as a barrier to knowledge or redemption. To the contrary, Cervantes reframes the incorrigible nature of the human body—its sensuality as well as its bestiality—in order to ground his discursive practices and moral vision in an earthly arena, where other tongues must be learned and other bodies touched in order to break through the silence of desengaño and its symbolic interdictions.

Flaying Bartholomew: Jonson’s Hagiographic Parody

Next article No AccessFlaying Bartholomew: Jonson’s Hagiographic ParodyAlison A. ChapmanAlison A. ChapmanUniversity of Alabama at Birmingham Search for more articles by this author University of Alabama at BirminghamPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 101, Number 4May 2004 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/423632 Views: 16Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref © 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: In-Hwan Doh Reading Bartholomew Fair from the Perspective of Bakhtinian Grotesque Realism, Journal of Classic and English Renaissance Literature 26, no.22 (Dec 2017): 71–98.https://doi.org/10.17259/jcerl.2017.26.2.71Eugene Giddens Recent Research on Ben Jonson, Shakespeare 12, no.44 (Aug 2016): 473–485.https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2016.1211732Andrew Moran An Emetic upon St. Bartholomew's Day: Purging, Stripping, and Reclothing the Pauline Body in Bartholmew Fair, Ben Jonson Journal 22, no.11 (May 2015): 23–40.https://doi.org/10.3366/bjj.2015.0120

The Uses of Irony and the Carnivalesque in Leigh Hobbs’ Picture Books

Leigh Hobbs' popular Australian texts are reviewed to consider their carnivalesque and interrogative qualities. His series of 'Old Tom' books, and 'Horrible Harriet' deploy a number of features of carnivalesque textuality, notably the grotesque realism with which bodily functions are depicted, strategies of role-playing which disrupt social norms, and the interrogation of hierarchies and status.

Murder and Masculinity, Violent Fictions of Twentieth-Century Latin America

Rebecca Biron breaks new ground in this study of masculinity, violence, and the strategic construction of collective political identities in twentieth-century Latin American fiction. By engaging current sociological, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories, Murder and Masculinity analyzes the cliche of proving virility through violence against women. Biron develops her argument through close readings of five works: Jorge Luis Borges's La intrusa, Armonia Somer's El despojo, Clarice Lispector's A Maca no Escuro, Manuel Puig's The Buenos Aires Affair, and Reinaldo Arenas's El Asalto. Although men murdering women is often interpreted as nothing more than machista misogyny, Biron argues that the five narratives addressed in this book show that healed masculinities are essential to the achievement of cultural identity and political autonomy in Latin America. The introduction to this study deftly situates Biron's work in relation to previous theoretical arguments on the social and political dimensions of Latin American writing. The five subsequent chapters offer superb analyses of the individual texts. Like their male protagonists who experiment with the psychological and legal extremes of gender division, these narratives risk nonconformity to the laws of genre in their quest for liberation from violent social and literary conventions. In combining elements of detective stories, crime narratives, psychological case studies, and magical or grotesque realism, they offer metafictional commentary on a network of discourses that confuses images of masculinity, national identity, and political autonomy in postcolonial Latin America.

Comedy, the Carnivalesque, and the Depiction of English Society in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim

Hanif Kureishi’s first novel employs grotesque realism to lash out comically at the restrictions and stupidities of English society. So does Kingsley Amis’s carnivalesque Lucky Jim (1954), which influenced the writing of The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). In both novels, however, the political critique is compromised, but not totally annulled, by the self-seeking actions of the two protagonists, both of whom seem more intent on advancing their own interests than on improving society. The two novels contrast, furthermore, in their handling of power relations. Race is not a factor in Jim Dixon’s struggles, but it is an inescapable issue for Karim Amir.

Diplomacy, grotesque realism, and Ottoman historiography

(2000). Diplomacy, grotesque realism, and Ottoman historiography. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 213-226.

Rituele van plesier: Dolf van Coller se <i>Die Bieliebalies</i>

Rituals of pleasure: Dolf van Coller’s Die Bieliebalies This article is an analysis of Dolf van Coller's Die Bieliebalies (1993), read as a hedonist text. It has many points of similarity with what Bakhtin (1984) called grotesque realism, and with Nietzsche’s views as expounded in The birth of tragedy (1956). By comparing Van Caller's text to that of Bakhtin and Nietzsche, a counter-discourse to contemporary moral discourses such as feminism is explored. Van Coller’s use of laughter as a relativising mechanism is very liberating in the context where petty morality intervenes dogmatically in the field of literature and other spheres of life.

Bakhtinian Grotesque Realism and the Subversion of Biblical Authority in Rochester's Sodom

Rather than signalling Rochester's agreement with the presumptive biblical imprecation against sodomy and consequent divine vengeance, the apocalyptic denouement of The Farce of Sodom bespeaks defiance of divine judgment and a willingness to persevere in the pleasure of homosexual anal sex despite what might seem certain divine retribution. A Bakhtinian reading of the play's carnivalesque features concludes that it is the failure of all sexual endeavor, rather than of sodomy per se, that is dramatized in the farce's concluding scene. Sodom anticipates both the modern attitude towards the open male body that has come to dominate contemporary gay discourse, and the transgressive uses to which modern writers have put the Bible by which they undercut its authority and the presumptive morality that it is otherwise used to sanction.

PUTTING WOMEN IN THEIR PLACE: THE CARNIVAL AT GREENHAM COMMON*

ABSTRACTSIn this paper I examine reactions to the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. I argue that the media, local and government responses to the Greenham women reveal geographical assumptions about “normality.” The peace women, by living away from home, on the edge of a military (and therefore masculine) establishment challenged accepted patriarchal understandings of “women's place” and were thus described as “out of place.” More specifically, the women were referred to in terms of hygiene, inadequate culinary ability, sexuality and hysteria. Each of these implies a gendered form of disorder in which social, cultural and geographical boundaries have been transgressed. These reactions are placed within the context of Bakhtin's formulations of the carnivalesque and grotesque realism. I suggest that the women, through their highly visible opposition to a patriarchal military establishment, represent a threat to neatly bounded official culture which finds its geographical expression in the formal territories of the courtroom and the air base. In conclusion this illustration is placed in the wider context of cultural/political protest. I argue that transgression, while serving to reveal normally assumed hegemonic landscapes, is restrained by already existing boundaries.

Carnival: Death and Renewal in the Poetry of Gloria Fuertes

The word as used by Mikhail Bakhtin, refers to the culture of the marketplace and the forms of folk humor which arose in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The manifestations of this popular culture included comic festivities and ritual activities, memorialized in the oral and written parodies from which an entire body of recreational literature was born. Among the most salient traits of carnivalesque compositions are licentiousness, irreverence, and an exaggerated fascination with the human body and with its appetites and instincts, both noble and base. The ambivalence inherent in the portrayal of bodily impulses is central to the grotesque realism that Bakhtin attributes to Rabelais in particular and to carnival expression in general. For Bakhtin, the grotesque character of popular parodical literature is perhaps carnival's greatest triumph, for the very ambivalence of praise and degradation echoes the eternally unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming (Bakhtin, 24). The grotesque, in short, signals the cosmic triumph of regeneration over death.' The world of carnival, according to Bakhtin, traditionally stands outside of an official culture marked by sobriety and asceticism, intolerance and repression.2 These elements conspire to produce

The Marginal World of Ōe Kenzaburo: A Study in Themes and Techniques. By Michiko N. Wilson. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1986. viii, 160 pp. Biographical Notes, Notes, Selected Bibliography, Index. $30.

The first full-length book devoted to Japan's 1994 Nobel Laureate, The Marginal World of Kenzaburo Oe introduces the literary universe bursting with the explosive energies of Bakhtinian grotesque realism. In its center stands the idiot son, a trickster and soulful healer, unknowingly thrown into the world of myth-making and history. The diverse voices of Oe's characters resonate with one another within and between reinvented texts as the book's analysis flow into the very pores and veins of his masterful writing.