"Applying the insights of Mikhail Bakhtin and recent French critical theorists to the concept of hierarchies in Western society, Stallybrass and White explore the symbolic polarities of the exalted and the base. The authors compare high and low discourse in a variety of domains, and discover that, in every case, the polarities structure and depend upon each other and, in certain instances, interpenetrate to produce political change. In this wide-ranging book, the authors, drawing largely on Bakhtin's notion of the carnival, map out hierarchies in literary and cultural history. Looking closely at a variety of texts from the 17th to the 20th century, they find that high-low oppositions occur in four symbolic domains--psychic forms, the human body, geographic space, and social order--and are fundamental to the mechanisms of ordering in European culture. Transgressing the rules of hierarchy and order in any one of these domains, the authors assert, is likely to have major consequences in the other three. Unconfined by conventional disciplinary boundaries, this investigation of the interplay between limits and transgressions within hierarchies will fascinate students of literary theory and English literature as well as those of intellectual and cultural history, psychology, and anthropology." -- Back cover

"This is an exceptional collection—the subject is of obvious importance, yet terribly undertheorized and unexamined. I know of no other work that offers what this collection provides."—Marcia Millman, author of Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America ". . . A valuable contribution to scholarly debates on the place of excessive bodies in contemporary culture. This book promises to enrich all areas of inquiry related to the politics of bodies."—Carole Spitzack, author of Confessing Excess: Women and the Politics of Body Reduction "This anthology includes a wide range of perceptive and original essays, which explore and analyze the underlying ideologies that have made fat "incorrect." Echoing the spirit of the nineteenth-century adage about children who should be neither seen nor heard, some of the authors powerfully remind us that we keep "bodies out of bound" silenced and unseen-unless, of course, we need to peek at the comic or grotesque."—Raquel Salgado Scherr, co-author of Face Value: The Politics of Beauty "Through textual analyses, video/film analyses, television theory, and literary theory, this collection demonstrates the various ways in which dominant representations of fat and corpulence have been both demonized and rendered invisible. . . . This volume will be a crucial corollary to work on the tyranny of slenderness; a collection of different perspectives on the fat body is sorely missing in women's studies, communication, and media studies."—Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity

Poetics en Passant presents a 'cross-channel' poetics that redefines the relationship between 'Victorian' and 'modern' poetry by understanding Christina Rossetti's poetics of 'stealth' as an important counterpart to Baudelairean 'shock.'

With this important new book, Susan Suleiman lays the foundation for a postmodern feminist poetics and theory of the avant-garde. She shows how the figure of Woman, as fantasy, myth, or metaphor, has functioned in the work of male avant-garde writers and artists of this century. Focusing also on women's avant-garde artistic practices, Suleiman demonstrates how to read difficult modern works in a way that reveals their political as well as their aesthetic impact. Suleiman directly addresses the subversive intent of avant-garde movements from Surrealism to postmodernism. Through her detailed readings of provocatively transgressive works by André Breton, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and others, Suleiman demonstrates the central role of the female body in the male erotic imagination and illuminates the extent to which masculinist assumptions have influenced modern art and theory. By examining the work of contemporary women avantgarde artists and theorists--including Hélène Cixous, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Leonora Carrington, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Cindy Sherman--Suleiman shows the political power of feminist critiques of patriarchal ideology, and especially emphasizes the power of feminist humor and parody. Central to Suleiman's revisionary theory of the avant-garde is the figure of the playful, laughing mother. True to the radically irreverent spirit of the historical avant-gardes and their postmodernist successors, Suleiman's laughing mother embodies the need for a link between symbolic innovation and political and social change.

This book centers on visual and literary productions of Francophone Caribbean women. It investigates their aesthetics of violence, pain, the abhorrent, and the “uglification” of the feminine to unravel what makes them transgressive and uncommodifiable. It probes the ways in which these works destroy the regimentation of the “ideal” body.

The years 1909–1930, the eleven-year presidency of the businessman-turned-politician Augusto B. Leguía, mark a formative period of Peruvian modernity, witnessing the continuity of a process of reconstruction and the founding of an intellectual and cultural tradition after a humbling defeat during the War of the Pacific (1879–1883). But these years were also fraught with conflict generated by long-standing divisions and new rivalries. A postwar generation of intellectuals and artists, led by José Carlos Mariátegui and galvanized by left-wing thinking and an avant-garde aesthetic, sought representation in the fields of politics and the arts, and participation in the process of reconstruction initiated by a Positivist oligarchy. New political and artistic conceptions raised their awareness of the fractured sense of nationhood in Peru and the need for a new project of nation-formation centered on a common political and cultural consciousness. They also gave rise to divergent political and artistic practices and projects. Amongst these, Mariátegui’s Indigenist-Marxist politics and Modernist-inspired poetics were pivotal in revitalizing, conciliating and channeling those of his cohorts and challengers. Comprising six full-length chapters, a comprehensive Introduction and Conclusion, this monograph is extensive in scale and scope. It provides fresh readings of key writings of Mariátegui, one of Latin America’s most important and revolutionary political, cultural and aesthetic theorists, through the lens of his poetics, emphasizing the value of this approach for a fuller understanding of his work’s political meaning and impact. It does so through detailed analysis of the poetic, expressive language employed in seminal political essays, aimed at forging a new Marxist position in 1920s Peru. Furthermore, it offers powerful and original critiques of understudied intellectuals of this time, especially aprista-Futurist, Socialist and Indigenist female writers and artists, such as Magda Portal and Ángela Ramos, whose work he championed. These readings are fully contextualized in terms of detailed critical study of complex sociopolitical conditions and positions, and bio-bibliographical, intellectual backgrounds of Mariátegui and his contemporaries. The monograph examines and underscores the fundamental importance of Mariátegui’s, and their, politico-poetic practices and projects for forging a national-cum-cosmopolitan, shared, yet also heterogeneous, political culture and cultural tradition in 1920s Peru.

The latest publication in the award-winning Discussions in Contemporary Culture series, Black Popular Culture gathers together an extraordinary array of critics, scholars, and cultural producers. 30 essays explore and debate current directions in film, television, music, writing, and other cultural forms as created by or with the participation of black artists. 30 illustrations.