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J. Wawrzinek, Ambiguous Subjects. Dissolution and Metamorphosis in the Postmodern Sublime

J. Wawrzinek, Ambiguous Subjects. Dissolution and Metamorphosis in the Postmodern Sublime

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Site web de la maison d'édition)

WAWRZINEK, Jennifer, Ambiguous Subjects. Dissolution and Metamorphosis in the Postmodern Sublime, Amsterdam / New York, Rodopi (GENUS: Gender in Modern Culture), 2009, 156 p.

ISBN 9789042025486

RÉSUMÉ

In the history of ideas, the aesthetic categories of the sublimeand the grotesque have exerted a powerful force over the culturalimagination. Ambiguous Subjectsis one of the first studies to examine the relationship between theseconcepts. Tracing the history of the sublime from the eighteenthcentury through Burke and Kant, Wawrzinek illustrates the ways in whichthe sublime has traditionally been privileged as an inherentlymasculine and imperialist mode of experience that polices and abjectsthe grotesque to the margins of acceptable discourse, and the way inwhich twentieth-century reconfigurations of the sublime increasinglyenable the productive situating of these concepts within a dialogicrelation as a means of instating an ethical relation to others.
Thisbook examines the articulations of both the sublime and the grotesquein three postmodern texts. Looking at novels by Nicole Brossard andMorgan Yasbincek, and the performance work of The Women's Circus,Wawrzinek illuminates the ways in which these writers and performersrestructure the spatial and temporal parameters of the sublime in orderto allow various forms of highly contingent transcendence that alwaysnecessarily remain in relation to the grotesque body. Ambiguous Subjectsillustrates how the sublime and the grotesque can co-exist in a mannerwhere each depends on and is inflected through the other, thus enablinga notion of individuality and of community as contingent, butnevertheless very real, moments in time.

TABLE DES MATIÈRES

Introduction: Sublime Politics
The Haunting of Transcendence
Erotic Encounters: Nicole Brossard's Radical Other in Le Désert mauve
Navigating the Contingent Subject in Morgan Yasbincek's liv
“When I'm Up There It Feels Like Heaven”: Aerial Bodies and The Women's Circus' Secrets
A New Transcendental
Works Cited