The abject of desire : the aestheticization of the unaesthetic in contemporary literature and culture / edited by Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Kutzbach, Konstanze.

Mueller, Monika, 1960-

Series:

Genus--gender in modern culture ; 9.

Genus--gender in modern culture ; 9

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Aesthetics.

Culture.

Literature, Modern--History and criticism.

Literature, Modern.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (310 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; New York : Rodopi, 2007.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

data file

Summary:

The Abject of Desire approaches the aestheticization of the unaesthetic via a range of different topics and genres in twentieth-century Anglophone literature and culture. The “experience of disgust”, which Winfried Menninghaus describes as “an acute crisis of self-preservation”, is correlated with conceptualizations of gender in theories of the abject/abjection. In view of this general crisis of identity in the experience of disgust, the contributions to this volume discuss examples of the aestheticization of the unaesthetic in cultural representations and locate conceptual (re)codings of the body, gender, and identity with regard to the abject as an immediate and uncompromising experience on the one hand, and a social and political phenomenon on the other. Considering a variety of cultural narratives by writers as diverse as Samuel Delany, Sarah Schulman, Joyce Carol Oates, Leslie Marmon Silko, Paul Magrs, J. G. Ballard, Stevie Smith, T. C. Boyle, Joseph Conrad, Poppy Z. Brite, and Will Self, by film directors John Waters and Peter Greenaway, playwrights Girish Karnad and Mahesh Dattani, and “body artist” Gunter von Hagens, the contributors to this volume scrutinize different implications of the ambivalent concept of the abject/abjection.

Contents:

Preliminary Material

Introduction / Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller

On the Matter of Abjection / Hanjo Berressem

Queer Transformations: Renegotiating the Abject in Contemporary Anglo-American Lesbian Fiction / Paulina Palmer

The Bhibhitsa Rasa in Anglophone Indian Cultural Discourse: The Repugnant and Distasteful at the Level of Gender, Race, and Caste / Nilufer E. Bharucha

The Gothic-Grotesque of Haunted: Joyce Carol Oates’s Tales of Abjection / Susana Araújo

“Now we know that gay men are just men after all”: Abject Sexualities in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead / Dorothea Fischer-Hornung

Consuming the Body: Literal and Metaphorical Cannibalism in Peter Greenaway’s Films / Tatjana Pavlov

Shape-Shifters from the Wilderness: Werewolves Roaming the Twentieth Century / Andrea Gutenberg

The Two-…, One-…, None-Sex Model: The Flesh(-)Made Machine in Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” and J. G. Ballard’s Crash / Konstanze Kutzbach

Fear, Melancholy, and Loss in the Poetry of Stevie Smith / Ruth Baumert

American Environmentalism and Encounters with the Abject: T. Coraghessan Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth / Sylvia Mayer

Abject Cannibalism: Anthropophagic Poetics in Conrad, White, and Tennant – Towards a Critique of Julia Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection / Russell West

“A Wet Festival of Scarlet”: Poppy Z. Brite’s (Un)Aesthetics of Murder / Monika Mueller

Interior Landscapes: Anatomy Art and the Work of Gunther von Hagens / Alison Goeller

Violence, Transgression, and the Fun Factor: The Imagined Atrocities of Will Self’s My Idea of Fun / Frank Lay

Notes on Contributors.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

1-282-26558-X

9786612265587

94-012-0489-6

1-4356-0492-X

OCLC:

175043941

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789401204897 DOI