E-Book Overview
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.
E-Book Content
The Abject of Desire GENUS: Gender in Modern Culture 9 Russell West-Pavlov (Berlin) Jennifer Yee (Oxford) Frank Lay (Cologne) Sabine Schülting (Berlin) The Abject of Desire The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture Edited by Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Illustration cover: Monika Mueller Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2264-5 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in the Netherlands CONTENTS Introduction Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller 7 On the Matter of Abjection Hanjo Berressem 19 in 49 The Bhibhitsa Rasa in Anglophone Indian Cultural Discourse: The Repugnant and Distasteful at the Level of Gender, Race, and Caste Nilufer Bharucha 69 The Gothic-Grotesque of Haunted: Joyce Carol Oates’s Tales of Abjection Susana Araújo 89 “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 107 Consuming the Body: Literal and Metaphorical Cannibalism in Peter Greenaway’s Films Tatjana Pavlov 129 Shape-Shifters from the Wilderness: Werewolves Roaming the Twentieth Century Andrea Gutenberg 149 Queer Transformations: Renegotiating the Contemporary Anglo-American Lesbian Fiction Paulina Palmer Abject 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 181 Fear, Melancholy, and Loss in the Poetry of Stevie Smith Ruth Baumert 197 American Environmentalism and Encounters with the Abject: T. Coraghessan Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth Sylvia Mayer 221 Abject Cannibalism: Anthropophagic Poetics in Conrad, White, and Tennant – Towards a Critique of Julia Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection Russell West 235 “A Wet Festival of Scarlet”: Poppy Z. Brite’s (Un)Aesthetics of Murder Monika Mueller 255 Interior Landscapes: Anatomy Art and the Work of Gunther von Hagens Alison Goeller 271 Violence, Transgression, and the Fun Factor: The Imagined Atrocities of Will Self’s My Idea of Fun Frank Lay