Classical, French, and Russian Literature 1. RATIONALE FOR THE

Rebecca Pyatkevich, Ph.D.
Lewis & Clark College
SAMPLE PROPOSED COURSE
THE MANY FACES OF THE GROTESQUE:
Classical, French, and Russian Literature
1. RATIONALE FOR THE COURSE:
According to Aristotle and to Horace, literature is supposed to showcase pleasing unities and
harmonies. Yet, in contradistinction to these theories, the literary work (even if held up by the theorists as
a perfect example of harmony and unity) has often been preoccupied not with reality and not with beauty,
but with that which strikes the reader as ugly, abhorrent, unmotivated, bizarre, and decidedly unreal. In
this course, we will explore the functioning of these problematic images under the category of the
grotesque.
Following the work of G.G. Harpham, Wolfgang Kayser, Yelisheva Rosen, Mikhail Bakhtin, Yuri
Mann, and others (see bibliography), I define the grotesque in a literary work as the rendering, in
apparently realistic terms, of two or more incompatible realities: graphic, deformed or hybrid. Such
portrayals have several important effects on the reader – they arouse the contradictory reactions of the
comic and the terrifying (Thompson); evoke the unnameable, or that which is beyond language
(Harpham); call into question, invert, or utterly erase the distinction between center and periphery (Rosen);
obliquely point to problematic extraliterary realities (Bakhtin), thus raising questions about the nature of
representation itself.
In calling attention to the problematics of representation, in evoking a
phantasmagorical world whose uncanny realism makes an implicit claim to some sort of mimetic validity,
in engineering a textual reaction that is primarily emotive and suspends the intellectual compartmentalizing
involved in the normal act of reading, the grotesque is subversive of traditional narrative structures, and of
the societies that depend on them.
In this course, we will explore how concepts of the grotesque have manifested themselves in the
literature of three great civilizations, and what the development and evolution of this aesthetic may tell us
about the literature and the societies of which it formed a part. In Part 1 of the course, we will look at
classical theories of literature that would seem to preclude the development of the grotesque, and
contemporaneous literary productions that combine classical ideals of beauty with the subversive elements
of the grotesque. In Part 2 of the course, we will look at the grotesque as it developed in Russia and
France from the Renaissance to the middle of 19th century, with specific focus on the body. We will
discuss the subversive potential of the body as a sign that can signify simultaneously the body of the
individual and the body politic. In Part 3, we will look at the use of the grotesque in Russian and French
Rebecca Pyatkevich, Ph.D.
Lewis & Clark College
literature as a response to the cultural shifts of urbanization, depersonalization, and industrialization of the
19th and the early 20th century. Finally, in Part 4, we will look at the grotesque as a response to the
upheavals of the 20th century, and as a natural form of the postmodern.
2. READING LIST:
Part 1: The Classical Canon and the Grotesque
Homer, The Iliad
Euripides, The Bacchae
Ovid, The Metamorphoses (selections)
Horace, Satires (selections)
Critical readings: Horace, Ars Poetica
Aristotle, Poetics
Part 2: The Body as a Grotesque
Rabelais, Gargantua et Pantagruel (excerpts); Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World
Voltaire: Candide
Gogol, The Nose
Baudelaire, Selected poems and critical writings.
Part 3: Brave New Grotesque World
Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
Zola, Germinal
Appollinaire, Les Mammelles de Tiresias
Part 4: Philosophy, History, Art: The Grotesque (Post) Modern
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Georges Bataille, Le Bleu du Ciel
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
“Life with an Idiot”, Viktor Yerofeyev
Rebecca Pyatkevich, Ph.D.
Lewis & Clark College
PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Hélène Iswolsky, trans. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University
Press, 1984.
Breut, Michèle. Le Haut et le Bas : Essai sur le grotesque dans « Madame Bovary » de Gustave Flaubert.
Amsterdam : Rodopi, 1994.
Clark, John R. The Modern Satiric Grotesque and Its Traditions. The University Press of Kentucky, 1991.
Gordon, Linda. “The Surrealist Grotesque.” Seriously Weird: Papers on the Grotesque (Alice Mills, ed.). New
York: Peter Lang, 1999. pp. 193-206.
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1982.
Howarth, W. D. Sublime and Grotesque: a Study of French Romantic Drama. London: Harrap, 1975.
Hulten, Karl Gunnar Pontus, et al. The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face From the 16th to the 20th
Century. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1987.
Iehl, Dominique. “Deux grotesques?”. A la recherché du grotesque: colloque international, novembre 1993, institut
Finlandais-Paris (Tarmo Kunnas, and Paul Gorcieux, eds). Paris : Eurédit, 2003. pp. 205-214.
Kayser, Wolfgang, Ulrich Weisstein, trans.
Bloomington University Press, 1963.
The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Bloomington, Ind. :
Kunnas, Tarmo, and Gorcieux, Paul. A la recherché du grotesque: colloque international, novembre 1993, institut
Finlandais-Paris. Paris : Eurédit, 2003.
Mann, Yurii. O groteske v literature. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1996.
Masters-Wicks, Karen. Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” and the Novels of the Grotesque. New York: Peter Lang,
1994.
Meyer, Michael J., ed. Literature and the Grotesque. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.
Mills, Alice, ed. Seriously Weird: Papers on the Grotesque. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
Mortier, Roland. L’Originalité: Une nouvelle catégorie esthétique au siècle des Lumières. Genève: Librairie Droz
S.A., 1982.
Murray, Timothy. « Philosophical Antibodies : Grotesque Fantasy in a French Stoic Fiction », Yale French
Studies, No. 86 : Corps Mystique, Corps Sacré: Textual Trasnfigurations of the Body from the Middle Ages to the
Seventeenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. pp. 143-163.
Phillippon, Michel. « Impatience et création : l’origine « grotesque » de l’art chez Paul Valéry ». A la
recherché du grotesque: colloque international, novembre 1993, institut Finlandais-Paris (Tarmo Kunnas, and Paul
Gorcieux, eds). Paris : Eurédit, 2003. pp. 163-186.
Rebecca Pyatkevich, Ph.D.
Lewis & Clark College
Por, Peter. « Apollinaire relu sous l’angle du grotesque ». A la recherché du grotesque: colloque international,
novembre 1993, institut Finlandais-Paris (Tarmo Kunnas, and Paul Gorcieux, eds). Paris : Eurédit, 2003.
pp. 187-204.
Robertson, Alton Kim. The Grotesque Interface: Deformity, Debasement, Dissolution. Vervuert : Iberoamericana,
1996.
Rollins, Yvone Bargues. Baudelaire et le grotesque. Washington, D.C. : University Press of America, 1978.
Rosen, Elisheva.
Sur le grotesque : L’ancien et le nouveau dans la réflexion esthétique.
Universitaires de Vincennes, 1991.
Paris :
Presses
____________. « L’ étrange séduction du grotesque ». A la recherché du grotesque: colloque international,
novembre 1993, institut Finlandais-Paris (Tarmo Kunnas, and Paul Gorcieux, eds). Paris : Eurédit, 2003.
pp. 205-214.
Rousset, Jean. La littérature de l’âge baroque en France: Circé et le paon. Paris : José Corti, 1995.
Swain, Virginia E. Grotesque Figures : Baudelaire, Rousseau, and the Aesthetics of Modernity. Baltimore, MD : The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Thompson, Phillip. The Grotesque. London : Methuen & Co., 1972.