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American Literature Association
18th Annual Conference
Boston, MA, 24-27 May 2007
Susan
Glaspell Society Sponsored Panel
“The
Grotesque in the Work of Susan Glaspell, Djuna Barnes, Zora
Neale Hurston, and Their Modernist Contemporaries"
Friday, May 25, 2007–2:00-3:20
Chair:
Mary E. Papke, University of Tennessee
"'Getting
at things in terms of the preposterous': The Satiric Grotesque
in Susan Glaspell’s World War I-Era Stories," Martha C.
Carpentier, Seton Hall University
"Macabre Revelations: The Grotesque
and Eugenics in Glaspell and MacKaye," Kimberly A. Miller,
Fort Hays State University
"The Grotesque Tradition and Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God," Mary Balkun, Seton
Hall University
As Philip Thomson
argues in his The Grotesque, the grotesque
depends for its effect on disharmony and ambiguity, an
interruption of the normal by an eruption of the
freakish, the ominous, and the estranged. He goes on to
argue that it most often appears in art and literature
during periods of great strife, radical change, or
profound disorientation, periods, that is, like that of
the modernists in which artists responded in their works
to both national and international crises and
possibilities. The American literary grotesque is
exemplified in the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery
O’Connor, but it is not totally surprising that it also
figures in important ways in the work of early
modernists who were determined to break with the
sentimental and romantic movements that preceded their
emergence and to make of American literature something
shockingly new. The grotesque in art is typically
defined as work in which the natural and the monstrous
are intertwined in bizarre or fanciful combinations;
somewhat strangely, then, the grotesque character
elicits from the reader both disgust and empathy in that
such a character repulses us even as it whets our desire
to understand its otherness. In Glaspell’s work, we see
the grotesque emerge both in her plays (such as The
Verge) and in her novels (Fugitive’s Return,
for example), two examples that indicate well the
different uses to which the grotesque can be put. Other
modernists employ the grotesque in similarly innovative
ways.
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