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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.
In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyzes the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors. Kristeva identifies the abject with the eruption of the real and the presence of death. She explores how art and religion each offer ways of purifying the abject, arguing that amid abjection, boundaries between subject and object break down.
"Undergraduate and graduate courses on monsters are becoming widespread as many disciplines use monsters to think about what it means to be human. To date no source collection on the literature of the monstrous exists, and this first volume of two offers the seminal essays on monster theory. The texts exemplify their period or genre, and have proved influential as exemplars for further cultural appropriations. Each work is preceded by a critical introduction, reading questions, notes and further reading - all valuable introductory material for students. Accompanied by a second volume of primary source material and an instructor's website, this text will prove essential reading for students and scholars alike."--Bloomsbury Publishing.
Feminist theorists have often argued that aesthetic surgeries and body makeovers dehumanize and disempower women patients, whose efforts at self-improvement lead to their objectification. Amending the Abject Body proposes that although objectification is an important element in this phenomenon, the explosive growth of "makeover culture" can be understood as a process of both abjection (ridding ourselves of the unwanted) and identification (joining the community of what Julia Kristeva calls "clean and proper bodies"). Drawing from the advertisement and advocacy of body makeovers on television, in aesthetic surgery trade books, and in the print and Web-based marketing of face lifts, tummy tucks, and Botox injections, Deborah Caslav Covino articulates the relationship among objectification, abjection, and identification, and offers a fuller understanding of contemporary beauty-desire.
In Abject Performances Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects—shame, disgust, and unbelonging—to capture experiences that lie at the edge of the mainstream, inspirational Latino-centered social justice struggles. Drawing from a diverse expressive archive that ranges from performance art to performative testimonies of personal faith-based subjection, Alvarado illuminates modes of community formation and social critique defined by a refusal of identitarian coherence that nonetheless coalesce into Latino affiliation and possibility.
SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. Following the success of Comma’s award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject – Julia Kristeva’s theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille’s societal equivalent – with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or ‘the other’, atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn’t exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us.
From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection Incorporated move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a punitive form of social death, illustrating how it has become a contested mode of political and cultural capital—empowering for some but oppressive for others. Escaping abjection's usual confines of psychoanalysis and aesthetic modernism, core to theories of abjection by thinkers such as Kristeva and Bataille, the contributors examine a range of media, including literature, photography, film, television, talking dolls, comics, and manga. Whether analyzing how comedic abjection can help mobilize feminist politics or how expressions of abjection inflect class, race, and gender hierarchies, the contributors demonstrate the importance of competing uses of abjection to contemporary society and politics. They emphasize abjection's role in circumscribing the boundaries of the human and how the threats abjection poses to the self and other, far from simply negative, open up possibilities for radically new politics. Contributors. Meredith Bak, Eugenie Brinkema, James Leo Cahill, Michelle Cho, Maggie Hennefeld, Rob King, Thomas Lamarre, Sylvère Lotringer, Rijuta Mehta, Mark Mulroney, Nicholas Sammond, Yiman Wang, Rebecca Wanzo
"You people put importance on your lives. Well, my life has never been important to anyone. I haven't got any guilt about anything," bragged the mass-murderer Charles Manson. "These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. . . . They are running in the streets--and they are coming right at you!" When a real murderer accuses the society he has brutalized, we are shocked, but we are thrilled by the same accusations when they are mouthed by a fictional rebel, outlaw, or monster. In Bitter Carnival, Michael Andr Bernstein explores this contradiction and defines a new figure: the Abject Hero. Standing at the junction of contestation and conformity, the Abject Hero occupies the logically impossible space created by the intersection of the satanic and the servile. Bernstein shows that we heroicize the Abject Hero because he represents a convention that has become a staple of our common mythology, as seductive in mass culture as it is in high art. Moving from an examination of classical Latin satire; through radically new analyses of Diderot, Dostoevsky, and Cline; and culminating in the courtroom testimony of Charles Manson, Bitter Carnival offers a revisionist rereading of the entire tradition of the "Saturnalian dialogue" between masters and slaves, monarchs and fools, philosophers and madmen, citizens and malcontents. It contests the supposedly regenerative power of the carnivalesque and challenges the pieties of utopian radicalism fashionable in contemporary academic thinking. The clarity of its argument and literary style compel us to confront a powerful dilemma that engages some of the most central issues in literary studies, ethics, cultural history, and critical theory today.
Love letters are potent. They breathe. They speak. They can arouse, comfort, captivate. They can also cut deep. The powerful, deeply personal letters collected here reveal the painful underside of love. Witness Winston Churchill 'growl with anger to be treated with benevolent indifference' and Edith Piaf reel in the throes of a 'terrible' passion. Through the letters of literary icons Charlotte Brontë, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, Hollywood stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and statesmen Henry VIII and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Yours Always offers an unusually intimate insight into the lives of such illustrious figures. Love is revealed here in its many shades of disharmony and confusion: unrequited, uncertain, imbalanced, unconventional, thwarted, failed and forbidden. Love is not always rose-tinted, and Yours Always illuminates the sorrows that can accompany falling in, falling out, and staying in love. Includes letter to and from: Charlotte Brontë, Richard Burton, Lord Byron, Winston Churchill, Marie Curie, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Henry VIII, Ted Hughes, Graham Greene, Franz Kafka, Marilyn Monroe, Iris Murdoch, Edith Piaf, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats