The World Made Strange: Grotesque Litera

This seminar examines the grotesque as one of Eastern European literature’s most productive formal resources: a way of revealing what happens when incompatibilities are forced into uneasy coexistence in various representational sites – whether that be the same body, image, voice, institution, or world. We will read works from a wide range of Eastern European traditions – Russian, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Albanian, South Slavic/post-Yugoslav, and Hungarian. The course is comparative and does not treat Eastern Europe as a monoculture. Instead, it asks why writers whose lives and works have been informed by a great diversity of forces – empires, border changes, modernization, war, revolution, state socialism, post-socialist transition, folklore, and ecological crisis – converge on the grotesque as a representational strategy.  We will also learn how to read the meanings of various grotesque representational staples – distorted bodies, animate objects, proliferating doubles, impossible bureaucracies, unstable genres, and comic catastrophe.

Across the semester, we will develop a sophisticated working definition of the grotesque by examining its greatest theorists – from Bakhtin and Kayser to Eikhenbaum, Ruskin, Thomson, Harpham, Russo, and Connelly.

The literary readings are assigned as whole works: unexcerpted novels and novellas, plays, and stories or story cycles. Only scholarship and theoretical books will be assigned in excerpts. All readings are available in English