»Auch die Wörter werden zu Körpern« Body, Sexuality and Carnavalesque Writing in Emine S. Özdamar’s Stories Mutterzunge and Großvaterzunge

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-70
Author(s):  
Clara Ervedosa
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Writing ◽  
The Grotesque ◽  
Grotesque Body

Abstract Based on the analysis of Mutterzunge and Großvaterzunge, this article demonstrates that Özdamar’s mode of dealing with the body and sexuality corresponds to Bakhtin’s concept of the »grotesque body« and that body and language are strongly interwoven. It argues that Özdamar’s »embodied writing« is emancipatory and that it subverts not only patriarchal discourses, but also bourgeois concepts of body, sexuality, and literature. Writing is not only a mental but also a corporeal activity that goes through the body and gives voice to it.

BEAUTY OR THE BEAST? THE GROTESQUE BODY IN THE SONG OF SONGS

2000 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 302-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Black
Keyword(s):  
Gender Politics ◽  
The Body ◽  
Song Of Songs ◽  
The Grotesque ◽  
Grotesque Body

AbstractThe expressions of love and desire made by the lovers in the Song of Songs include intimate and detailed poetic descriptions of the body. These often cause difficulty for interpreters because the imagery used is cryptic and seemingly nonsensical. Biblical scholars frequently express some discomfort or embarrassment over this language, yet largely maintain the view that it should be interpreted positively—as complementary and loving description. In all this, they are bowled over by their own amorous relationships with this text, which make them stutter and fumble almost as much as the Song's lovers do. This essay looks at (scrutinizes) the bodies in the Song of Songs—the physical bodies described in the Song and the textual body (corpus) with which readers engage. The literary and artistic construct of the grotesque serves—ostensibly perversely—as a heuristic for viewing bodily imagery and readerly desire. The grotesque's emphasis on the exaggerated and hybridised body and its weavings of the comic and the terrifying facilitate an investigation of the Song's gender politics and its complicated and potentially conflicting presentation of desire.

Baldesar Castiglione, Thomas Wilson, and the Courtly Body of Renaissance Rhetoric

1993 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne A. Rebhorn
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Social Position ◽  
The Body ◽  
Rhetorical Tradition ◽  
Thomas Wilson ◽  
The Grotesque ◽  
Grotesque Body

Abstract: Historically, the Renaissance marks a transformation in wfiich the elite classes come to define themselves by their aesthetic refinement, taste, and good manners. Accompanying this change is a special vision of the human body which is distinguished from that of artisans and peasants. This opposition has been described by Bakhtin as one between the classical body and the grotesque one, and it appears in the most unportant book for the Renaissance redefinition of the upper classes, Castiglione's II libro del cortegiano. Castiglione's view of the body actually derives from the rhetorical tradition of antiquity, in particular from Quintilian and Cicero's De oratore. A similar view appears in the works of Renaissance rhetoricians and can usefully be illustrated by analysis of Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), although the latter also retains a vision of the grotesque body as a result of the ambiguous social position of its author.

Reading the Body in Dickens’s Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 275-292
Author(s):  
Zeynep Harputlu Shah
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Infant Deaths ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Physical Degradation ◽  
Mutual Friend ◽  
The Grotesque ◽  
Grotesque Body

This article examines the ways in which the Victorian body and identity were being transformed in the mid-nineteenth century and identifies three distinctive ways the biological and normative boundaries of the body were violated as represented in Dickens’s fiction: the grotesque body, the vulnerable body and the dead body. In this sense, Dickens’s Bleak House (1851-53) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) present creative and challenging literary responses to the Victorian body abjected through deprivation, physical vulnerability and death. In the novels, the grotesque body challenges the abject via a tragicomic and hybrid representation of the body and of character. Regarding the vulnerable body, the study elaborates on a body “out-of-control”, threatening the boundaries between the object and the subject, inside and outside, by holding a liminal state through ill-health, excessive labour, starvation and physical degradation. Finally, it is argued that there was an intimate and abject relationship between the living and the dead bodies in the capital, beside prevalent infant deaths, high mortality rates, diseased bodies and overflowing graveyards in the city.

The imaginary age : poetry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Leanna Petronella
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
The University ◽  
Sexual Body ◽  
The Grotesque ◽  
Grotesque Body

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] My dissertation includes a critical introduction and a manuscript of poetry. The critical introduction, "There was no warm body in what you wrote": Redefining the Gurlesque via Patricia Lockwood's Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals' uses the contemporary poet Patricia Lockwood to argue for the expansion of Gurlesque poetics. First, I establish how Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg define the Gurlesque. Then, I demonstrate that Lockwood is a Gurlesque poet, and that her treatment of the body in various manifestations--the sexual body, the grotesque body, the traumatized body--complicates these poetics. I argue that while Glenum and Greenberg's conceptualization of the Gurlesque necessitates a transparent relationship between writing about the body and meaning about the body, Lockwood's poetry shows that writing about the body can generate meaning across, through, tangential, and aside from the body. Via the lens of the Gurlesque, then, Lockwood's poetry illuminates the multiple opportunities for meaning in women's body-writing. My manuscript of poetry, "The Imaginary Age,"� is divided into three parts, and might be described as a neo-confessional, gurlesque poetry that is especially invested in the bestiary and the elegy.

Contortionist, Caricature and the Grotesque Body

Umní / Art ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol LV (5) ◽  
pp. 400-408
Author(s):  
Tomáš Winter
Keyword(s):  
The Grotesque ◽  
Grotesque Body

“A Chaos of Sin and Folly”: Art, Culture, and Carnival in Antebellum America

2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 515-535
Author(s):  
DAVID WALL
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Freak Show ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Grotesque ◽  
Grotesque Body

This essay looks at a variety of antebellum cultural productions and, utilizing Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque body, identifies the ubiquitous use of the tropes of carnival as a principal discourse in the construction of bourgeois subjectivity and the staging of its “low Others.” The essay examines the visual arts, popular literature, minstrelsy, and the freak show, demonstrating that as the grotesque body of the social and racial low Other is rejected and excluded socially, it returns constantly and repeatedly in narrative form. Appearing as it does across the broad spread of antebellum cultural domains, the grotesque body emerges as an object not only of disgust but also of deep and profound desire.

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