Grotesque Realism: The Body and its Functions in the Contemporary American Novel (Panel / In-Person)


Special Session
American / Gender and Sexuality

Tracee Howell (University of Pittsburgh - Bradford)
tlh3@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

At the center of the carnival, the body serves as material locus for both bacchanalic chaos and collective community through its universal and at the same time individual needs—food, sex, elimination. This panel invites papers that explore the presentation of the body in the contemporary American novel explicitly through a Bakhtinian lens. How do today’s writers utilize the human body—and its temporality—to challenge hegemonic discourses of Americanization and identity, gender hierarchies, genre, and literary boundaries?

At the center of the carnival, the human body serves as material locus for both bacchanalic chaos and collective community through its universal and at the same time individual needs—food, sex, elimination. This panel invites papers that explore the presentation of the body in the contemporary American novel explicitly through a Bakhtinian lens. How do today’s writers utilize the human body—and its temporality—to challenge hegemonic discourses of Americanization and identity, language, gender hierarchies, etc.? Even at its most vulnerable and/or oppressed, might the body serve as a site of political resistance and social empowerment, of individual freedom and human unity, within the present-day novel? Long a centralized trope, how does the human body function within current fiction as a metaphoric means of challenging genre, language privilege, or other literary boundaries, such as “realism”? Papers that focus on writers of color and women writing novels in the U.S. that explore the racialized, ethnic, and/or gendered body through the Bakhtinian carnivalesque are especially welcome.