American fiction and the metaphysics of the grotesque

Resource Information

The work American fiction and the metaphysics of the grotesque represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri-St. Louis Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

American fiction and the metaphysics of the grotesque

Statement of responsibility

Dieter Meindl

Creator

• Meindl, Dieter

Contributor

• University of Missouri Press

Subject

• American fiction -- History and criticism
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Grotesque in literature

Genre

• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

"By synthesizing Kayser's and Bakhtin's views of the grotesque and Heidegger's philosophy of Being, American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque seeks to demonstrate that American fiction from Poe to Pynchon has tried to convey the existential dimension: the pre-individual totality or flow of life, which defines itself against the mind and its linguistic capacity. Dieter Meindl shows how the grotesque, through its self-contradictory nature, has been instrumental in expressing this reality-conception, an antirationalist stance in basic agreement with existential thought. The historical validity of this new metaphysics, which grants precedence to Being--the context of cognition--over the cognizant subject, must be upheld in the face of deconstructive animadversions upon any metaphysics of presence. The notion of decentering the subject, Meindl argues, did not originate with deconstruction. The existential grotesque confirms the protomodernist character of classic American fiction. Meindl traces its course through a number of well-known texts by Melville, James, Gilman, Anderson, Faulkner, and O'Connor, among others. To convey life conceived as motion, these writers had to capture--that is, immobilize--it in their art: an essentially distortive and, therefore, grotesque device. Melville's "Bartleby," dealing with a mort vivant, is the seminal text in this mode of indirectness. As opposed to the existential grotesque, which grants access to a preverbal realm, the linguistic grotesque of postmodern fiction works on the assumption that all reality is referable to language in a textual universe. American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque will significantly alter our understanding of certain traditions in American literature."--Publishers website

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

813.009/1

Government publication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Index

index present

LC call number

PS374.G78

LC item number

M45 1996

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography