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.
In this broadly conceived study, Ralf Remshardt delineates the theatre’s deep connection with the grotesque and traces the historically extensive and theoretically intensive relationship between performance and its “other,” the grotesque. Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Performance examines the aesthetic complicity shared by the two in both art and theatre and presents a general theory of the grotesque.
Performing the grotesque is both a challenge to a culture’s order and the affirmation of certain ethical principles that it recognizes as its own. Remshardt investigates the aesthetics and ideology of grotesque theatre from antiquity—in works such as The Bacchae and Thyestes—to modernity—in Ubu Roi and Hamletmachine—and opens up new critical possibilities for the analysis of both classical and avant-gardetheatre.
Divided into three sections, Staging the Savage God first interrogates the grotesque as primarily a visual artistic and theatrical mode and then inventories various critical approaches to the grotesque, establishing the outlines of a theory with regard to drama. In the most extensive part of the study, Remshardt shifts his emphasis to the theatre of the grotesque, from self-consuming tragedies and the modernist trope of the artificial human figure to the characterology of the grotesque. Remshardt’s conclusion takes bold steps toward unraveling the paradox inherent in the grotesque theatre.
Written in an engaging style and aided by nine illustrations, Staging the Savage God is a comprehensive and rigorous study that incorporates critical approaches from disciplines such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, art history, literature, and theatre to fully investigate the historical function of the grotesque in performance.
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