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Grotesque In Modern Art

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The reemergence of the grotesque in the arts was only one of a remarkable range of new expressive models through which the grotesque was extended, expanded, and reinvented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These cultural vehicles for the grotesque included such disparate developments as psychoanalysis, photography, mass media, science fiction, ethnography, weapons of mass destruction, globalization, and virtual reality. The modern era witnessed an explosion of literary imagery that in various ways incorporated grotesque. A remarkable number of canonical works of modernism, include motifs from classical literature. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, Richard III by William Shakespeare, …show more content…

The neoclassical foundations of art history and aesthetics, with their emphasis on ideated beauty and rational inquiry, set up an intrinsic hostility toward grotesque. There is, however, an even unprecedented disjuncture and shifting boundaries, with the collision of cultures and scientific challenges repeatedly stripping away the veneer of familiar reality from the chaos of raw experience. The details lay down bare the answers to the mystery of the readers’ attraction to the gothic and grotesque. They help clear out the invoking of sympathy to the characters …show more content…

In recognition of the grotesque as the slipperiest of aesthetic qualities the flurry of nineteenth century writers addressing the grotesque did so by exploring its aesthetic, social and philosophical significance.
Theoretical attempts to iron down the meaning and implications of the grotesque have addressed it alternately as a quality of media or as a quality of interaction with media, or even alternatively as a quality of the act of mediation itself. As a quality of media the grotesque has proven particularly susceptible to the conceptual fluctuations of history.
Kayser,(1981) the father of modern grotesque theory, identifies the definition of the term as the central issue in the study of it, assessing it himself as the appearance of a reality that is simultaneously of and opposed to the worlds in which its audience take part. Kayser’s focus on definition is not novel, but the direction from which he approaches the issue

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Saba Mirfatahi Professor Bourget English 1130 October 6th 2015 Mitford: Analysis of “Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain” Jessica Mitford’s, “Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain,” is an assertive account of the true realisms involving embalming. Jessica Mitford takes a bold stand against the funeral industry and states that people are “blissfully ignorant” (Mitford 310) on preserving people. Ultimately, Jessica Mitford’s argumentative essay is successful due to her very somber but informative and organized tone, her style using dark vivid imagery and quotations make her claims credible. One of the way’s in which Mitford’s argument is effective is through the use of her sarcastic tone. There are many words to describe Mitford’s tone; cocky, blunt,

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Authors like Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor have written a lot of different pieces that all have included different elements of the Grotesque, which make their writings standout. The definition from Webster’s Dictionary of a Grotesque is a style of decorative art characterized by fanciful or fantastic human and animal forms often interwoven with foliage or similar figures that may distort the natural into absurdity, ugliness or caricature. This type of writing to some people could be otherwise known as “freaks.” But, even though these two writers both have used this style of writing, do they possibly agree on the same things when actually writing about a “freak?” O’Connor stated that the reason she writes about “freaks” is because

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621 Words | 3 Pages

In the aged version of gothic romanticism, the gloomy aspects are still found; however, they are depicted in different manners. An example of modified gothic romanticism is seen in Washington Irving’s “The Devil and Tom Walker” by its supernatural conflict, and setting in the mysterious, abandoned Native American Fort. Irving’s

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Gothic Literature is known to incorporate many gothic elements into it’s stories. Authors such as Ransom Riggs, Horacio Quiroga, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edward Poe have done a great job by proving this using elements like monsters, grotesqueness, and fascination with the past. In both the novel Mrs. Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children by Riggs and the short story “Feather Pillow” by Quiroga two main characters died suddenly by a monster. In Mrs. Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children Jacob finds his Grandpa Abe dead by a “tentacle-mouth horror in the woods” (Riggs 39).

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The grotesque is part of the whole story, since the banality of superficial conversation till the moral blindness and the disappointing ending. The grotesque shows the misperception of the world by Mrs. Hopewell and her daughters. People that are busy judging others and not seeing themselves often end up disappointed. The society is in chaos. Who knows the rules will win the game.

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610 Words | 3 Pages

Humans tend are entertained by the most iniquitous things. Stephen King makes many significant points, one point being “the horror film has become the modern version of the public lynching” (paragraph 6). This is agreeable because all humans have some type of psychological problem, an evil and a good side, emotions that need satisfaction, and the similarities between horror films and public lynching. People may not recognize these things, but it does exist in everyday life. Stephen King’s article helps point these things out to readers.

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329 Words | 2 Pages

To define the meaning of the word hero would be someone who is selfless and courageous. There is no one alive right now who is as heroic as one of the most courageous Civil Rights Leader. The most courageous person is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. he was a man who wanted change in the world. Dr. King has a lot of the heroic characteristics he was a selfless man and a man who was showed no fear in the public eye.

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788 Words | 4 Pages

Fear can inhibit you from acting foolishly in the forthcoming. Additionally, horror alerts us of what may soon happen and restrains us from future affliction. By being set in the minds of others during these hair-raising situations, we learn to not go down the wrong path. By doing so, you avoid future misfortune. Nonetheless, fear alters our brain and crams it with horrific ideology.

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1420 Words | 6 Pages

The ocean not only engulfs two‑thirds of the earth but two‑thirds of Moby Dick; a literary space penned by Herman Melville which sweeps the reader in its ever‑elusive eddies of symbolic complexity. The symbolism in the novel ceaselessly ebbs and flows like the sea, submerging the reader into Melville’s imaginative sea voyage. This paper will examine the watery depths as a recognizable setting from the physical universe, further observing how Melville juxtaposes this element in such a peculiar way, that the reader has no choice but to abandon, “reason, tradition, belief, and rely solely on thought to interpret these images,” which accordingly creates an “opportunity for open imagination” (Glover, 2003:42) (Bachelard,1983: 22). What’s more, is that Melville has the ability to paint landscapes in words, “reveal[ing] the eye of a visual artist” (Wallace, 1992: 105).

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Gothic fiction has been around for centuries and many great works were created with gothic fiction being the main role. “The Vampyre” by John William Polidori is amongst one of the most famous works under the gothic fiction genre. In “The Vampyre” reflects several themes which also reflect current real life problems and issues of the 19th century. Those themes that are going to be discussed are time and place, power, sexual power, the uncanny, the sublime, crisis, and the supernatural and the real.

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Edgar Allan Poe’s frightening gothic style poetry and short novels about fear, love, death and horror are prominent to Gothic Literature and explore madness through a nerve-recking angle. The incredible, malformed author, poet, editor and novelist is recognized for his famous classical pieces such as “The Raven”, “Berenice” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”, pieces of work that mystically yet magnificently awakens readers with a gloomy spirit. Awakening the subject of madness through written work was viewed as insane during Poe’s times. Yet Poe published some of the worlds most magnificently frightening pieces of literature throughout history. In the following essay I will examine and cautiously analyze

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786 Words | 4 Pages

A beautiful portrait of the fair is built with Larson’s detailed depictions of “the buildings, waterways, and scenery” (Larson 274) within this spectacle. The clear pictures painted in the reader’s mind transports them to this wonder-filled attraction. However, more disturbing images are depicted in subtle ways, like the fact that Holmes “often smelled vaguely of chemicals” (Larson 46.) An image of horror conjures within the mind of the reader at this seemingly minuscule detail.

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650 Words | 3 Pages

This unsettling evokes some of the key features of the Gothic, such as the use of phantasmagoria, transgression, and excesses, all of which disturbed the reader by surrounding them with dark reflections of a reality portrayed through fiction. Pacts with the devil to obtain one’s desires, monks and aristocrats who revel in luxury — even if this means they must stain their hands with blood —, vampires and mad scientists: all corrupt one’s morals, all corrupt the false appearance of serenity. Likewise, the female vampires who torment Jonathan Harker disturb the harmony of the domestic sphere and unsettle the delicate balance between the private and the public domain. These vampiric women are marked by heightened sensuality and tacked to other fatal women that permeate art and European literature at the end of the nineteenth century. In this novel, fear and desire are often confused, a clue modern anxieties surrounding desire toward sensuous but degrading bodies.

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1259 Words | 6 Pages

She points to the deficiency of the Bakhtinian theory that fails to establish dialogism between the grotesque body and the female one. While explaining that although he relates the grotesque body to the images of womb, pregnancy and childbirth, he fails to recognize their close affinity to “to social relations of gender” (The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity 63). She condemns the Bakhtinian contradictory treatment of the female body, which simultaneously celebrates its generative and subversively debasing potential and abbreviates it to be a mere vessel to give new birth (RW 240). While trying to explain what “remains repressed and undeveloped” in her male counterpart, Russo points to the subversive potential of the female grotesque to overthrow the normative constraints on female actand look (Russo 63). “[D]efined […] in relation to the ideal, standard, or normative form” of the twentieth century, this work tends to argue that the female grotesque in contemporary age still has the power to create horror as it plays a fundamental role “to identity formation for both men and women as a space of risk and abjection” (Russo 12, Miles

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1012 Words | 5 Pages

Mary Shelley wrote about the monster in Frankenstein who said “why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust” (Shelley 105). Edgar Allan Poe described the character of Roderick Usher as no longer looking human after some unexplained circumstances had taken place. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke.

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