Week 2 Seminar - Lola Boorman PDF

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Lola Boorman...

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The Body in American Literature and Culture Seminar – Week 2 (07/10/2020) Attitude to disability – Mrs Hopewell’s attitude towards her daughter’s disability, unmasked Deception; their truth is never brought out to the surface Communicative power of the body, physical manifestations of emotion Manley uses the way the body presents emotions to deceive, as opposed to tell the truth Bakhtin – the bodily surface Fondness of the disabled/injured body – grotesque, lack of compassion from some of the character’s makes us evoke that compassion to replace the lack of it Gazing, looking and seeing – abled gaze Manley’s ableist view, not seeing Hulga as a person (fetishization) Exploring the difference between viewing and seeing – surface, not looking inside Problem with empathy and the ethics of looking Grotesque – surface level gaze at looking at the other Limited by the bodies that we are in? And the way that our bodies are perceived in society Relationship between mind and body, and the relationship between the body and literature Bodily triggers throughout the rest of the story, pregnancy, Mrs Hopewell’s face – moments of bodily intrusion Fetishization of the disabled body Language surrounding the Barn extract – sexualised language Overcompensating for his internal disability, by chasing after people with external disabilities Sex made to the grotesque; ‘whispered’ sense of the forbidden – sound Perversion of good country people – Mrs Freeman’s fascination of Hulga’s leg, yet her fascination is not received in the same way Manley’s perversion is received Ignorance of not understanding the disability Good country people – external judgement and stereotypes Religion – important to Flannery O’Conner Mrs Freeman and Manley – ableist Power dynamics, wanting to overpower someone who is disabled Lack of emotional health, hasn’t been able to have the experience because her mother has infantilised her The Leg – William Faulkner Form, does this add to the southern grotesque? Succinctness? Was the intent to make it difficult to follow? Are we in the shoes of the narrator? Feverish, confused, grotesque Hallucination? Other layers of how we are viewing the story Mental confusion and bodily confusion Challenges the dualism of the mind and the body Grotesque about things not cohering, dream chunks, jarring Things not fitting together properly More interested on what we don’t understand, as opposed to what we do Searching for things which aren’t obvious to us as we try and read it

Bakhtin reading – gaps and vacuums and orifices of the body Something about tripping over the leg and someone dies? I don’t know what happened in this story Haunting – can feel the haunting and knows the leg is not dead? How alive each part of the body? Mocking him – personified thing Failure? Part of the psyche Jekyll and Hyde quality to it – sensory link Horrific aspect of the grotesque Relationship between George and the Leg? Implication that he is haunting the leg Temporal stamp on the photograph at the end? – interesting that he doesn’t quite recognise himself Can you ever really know what you look like? Shadow in the photograph Survivor’s guilt? Shadow as the extrusion of the body Dark mirror image of you – Jekyll and Hyde moments Faces and heads – less personal than the leg Stability in the recognition of heads and faces, but in this story this isn’t quite right – incredibly disorientating Uncanny Freud stems from the word unheimlich Heimlich translates to homely Unhomely – Freud’s essay is about unpacking this word Inversion of the familiar feeling of home, all the things we know inverted, and presented to us in a defamiliarized way Gender – Corinthia scene How the grotesque sees the female body more generally She is likened to a lot of classical figures – romantic figure Enters as the function of women in this story Female hysteria – ghost of a character Burdening her with negative female figures Page 823 – all she really says is ‘Yes M’Lord’, background piece Fertile female body with nothing physically wrong with her Her voice becomes a body part – ghost of her body When her voice dies that’s when the rest of her dies...