ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

The Fantastic

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

Grandmother and the Kids

Science fiction, then, commonly uses techniques both from the realistic and the fantastic traditions of narrative to tell a story of which a referent, implicit or explicit, is the mind-set, the content, or the mythos of science and technology. In his Strategies of Fantasy, Brian Attebery shows how science fiction uses science as its ‘megatext.’ The nourishing medium, the origin of the imagery, the motive of the narrative, is to be found in the contents, assumptions, and world view of modern science and technology. ‘Science [writes Attebery] surrounds, supports, and judges SF in much the same way the Bible grounds Christian devotional poetry.’"--Ursula K. LeGuin, from the introduction to The Norton Book of Science Fiction (23-24)

The Fantastic

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

Tzvetan Todorov

The Fantastic

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

According to Todorov

“The fantastic” emerged as a distinct literary genre in the late eighteen and nineteenth century

The fantastic gives credence to the “supernatural” in a way mainstream literature does not

The French anthropologist Levi-Strauss once characterized myth as “an act of faith in a science yet unborn.” For Todorov, the “fantastic,” whenever it arises, likewise anticipates a future, not yet available science. For example, the 19th century’s infatuation with the fantastic, should be understood as anticipating the fin de siecle* emergence of the new “science” of psychology in the hands of Freud, James, Jung, etc.)

* fin de siecle: end of the cycle, end of the century

The Fantastic

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The GrotesqueThe Fantastic

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

M. C. Escher (1898-1972)

The Fantastic

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

M. C. Escher

“Reptiles”

The Fantastic

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

M. C. Escher

“Drawing Hands”

The Fantastic

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

M. C. Escher

“Relativity”

The Fantastic

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

The Fantastic

Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

At the 1:36 mark.

The Fantastic

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

Kafka by David Levine

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

The Fantastic

Kafkaesque:

Kaf•ka•esque

Pronunciation: (käf"ku-esk'), [key]—adj. 1. of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or resembling the literary work of Franz Kafka: the Kafkaesque terror of the endless interrogations. 2. marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity: Kafkaesque bureaucracies.

Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Copyright © 1997, by Random House, Inc., on Infoplease.

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

The Fantastic

The Absurd“You know the story of the crazy man who was fishing in a bathtub. A doctor with ideas as to psychiatric treatment asked him "if they were biting," to which he received the harsh reply: "Of course not, you fool, since this is a bathtub." That story belongs to the baroque type. But in it can be grasped quite clearly to what a degree the absurd effect is linked to an excess of logic.

Kafka’s world is in truth an indescribable universe in which man allows himself the tormenting luxury of fishing in a bathtub, knowing that nothing will come of it.”--Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

The Fantastic

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

The Fantastic

Joseph K., a Prague bureaucrat, finds himself charged with indeterminate crimes and struggles, without success to defend himself. He is finally found guilty and is stabbed to death by his accusers and left to rot in a quarry outside the city limits.

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The GrotesqueThe Fantastic

K., an architect, is commissioned by The Castle that overlooks a distant town. When he arrives to do his work, his employers deny that he has been engaged by them, and he lives out his life seeking, without success, to confirm his assignment with the castle, which remains inaccessible and remote (at one point he sets out to visit the castle, but no matter how long he walks, it remains forever in the distance), and K. eventually dies without ever making contact.

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

The Fantastic

Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman and his dysfunctional family’s sole means of support, awakes one morning to find himself transformed into a human-sized cockroach / dung beetle. As he eventually dies from abuse and hunger, his family finds itself reborn.

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

The Fantastic

”In the Penal Colony”

On a horrifying prison island, inmates have their “crimes” inscribed into their skin by a machine that uses huge, impaling needles.

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

The Fantastic

”The Hunger Artist”

A “performance artist” who starves himself for a living in circus sideshows eventually wastes away to a human skeleton, though no one even notices. With his last breath, he confesses that he engaged in his strange profession simply because he could not find anything he liked to eat. Upon his death, he is replaced in his cage by a powerful panther.

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

The Fantastic