Grotesque Revisited : Grotesque and Satire in the Post/Modern Literature of Central and Eastern Europe

201 Pages·2013·1.47 MB·English

by  Laurynas Katkus

Grotesque Revisited

Grotesque Revisited:
Grotesque and Satire in the Post/Modern
Literature of Central and Eastern Europe
Edited by
Laurynas Katkus
Grotesque Revisited:
Grotesque and Satire in the Post/Modern Literature of Central and Eastern Europe,
Edited by Laurynas Katkus
This book first published 2013
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2013 by Laurynas Katkus and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-4864-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4864-0
The preparation of this volume was supported
by The Lithuanian Culture Support Foundation.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1

The Gravity of the Grotesque: Bakhtin’s Dislocated Humanism
Galin Tihanov .............................................................................................. 5
Section I: Central European Monsters and Phantasmagorias

Of Satire and Satyrs: The Monstrous and the Third Reich in Postmodern
Culture About Eastern Europe
Peter Arnds ................................................................................................ 20

Hilarious Hell: Grotesque Phantasmagorias in Central and Eastern
European Prose of the Seventies and Eighties
Laurynas Katkus ........................................................................................ 31

The Revolution(s) of the Grotesque Body: Forms of Satirical
Demystification in the Post-Communist German and Romanian Novel
Roxana Ghita ............................................................................................. 46
Section II: Crossing, Mixing, Subverting

Hrabal’s Satirical Legacy in the Central European Autobiographical
Novel
Charles Sabatos ......................................................................................... 64

Forms of the Grotesque: Parallels and Intersections in Lithuanian
and Polish Literature
Algis Kal(cid:417)da .............................................................................................. 74

Grotesque and Heteroglossia in George Tabori’s Works, or:
“Alle guten Geschichten enden mit dem Tod”
Johanna Öttl ............................................................................................... 86

The Grotesque and Gender in Nils Sakss’ Prose
K(cid:407)rlis V(cid:413)rdi(cid:444)š ............................................................................................ 97
viii Introduction
The Creative Role of the Grotesque in the Moscow Section of Bulgokov’s
The Master and Margarita
Alexander Ivanitsky ................................................................................. 106
Section III: Laughter and Carnival in Troubled Times

Parody, Satire, and Carnivalisation in Romanian Poetic Postmodernism:
A Communicative Approach
Carmen Popescu ...................................................................................... 124

Novel and Satire: Discrepancies between Theory and Practice in Milan
Kundera’s Works
Inga Vidugiryt(cid:417) ........................................................................................ 137

On the Background, Stains, and Dry Cleaning: Soviet Satire
as the Practice of Speech
Tomas Vaiseta ......................................................................................... 149

The Grotesque Dimension of Witold Gombrowicz’s Novel Ferdydurke
Maciej Pi(cid:261)tek ........................................................................................... 167

The Grotesque and Memory in Contemporary Estonian Culture
Anneli Mihkelev ...................................................................................... 174

Contributors ............................................................................................. 185

Index ........................................................................................................ 189
INTRODUCTION
This collection of essays aims to recapitulate the state of grotesque
poetics in modern and postmodern writing. It concentrates on Central and
Eastern Europe, introducing the Western reader to the variety and
ingenuity of this region’s literary traditions, ranging from German and
Russian to Lithuanian and Romanian literatures. At the same time it seeks
to highlight the importance of the grotesque mode of writing in the region.
The historic scope of the volume ranges from the legacies of Nazi
dictatorship and exile to the post-communist times, but it is especially
focused on the Soviet era. Scholars, not only from Central and Eastern
Europe but also from Great Britain, Ireland, and Turkey, analyze the
literary devices of the grotesque, examining the relationship between
socio-political background and subversive representations of the
grotesque. Many studies take on a comparative and transnational approach.
Alternatively, some studies aim to present important and innovative
creators of grotesque texts in greater detail.
The concepts of the grotesque and Menippean satire have been
entrenched in contemporary literary theory by such scholars as Northrop
Frye, Wolfgang Kayser, and Mikhail Bakhtin. The enduring impact of
Bakhtin’s ideas in particular is the focus of this volume. Many contributors
to this book develop, expand, or polemicise using this Russian thinker’s
seminal studies on Rabelais and folk culture, and on Dostoyevsky.
For this reason it is logical that the introductory essay, titled “The
Gravity of the Grotesque: Bakhtin’s Dislocated Humanism”, is authored
by noted Bakhtin scholar Galin Tihanov. (He holds the George Steiner
Chair of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary School of Languages,
Linguistics, and Film at the University of London.) Tihanov proposes to
examine the notion of the grotesque body from the perspective of
Bakhtin’s other writings, most importantly through his works on Goethe
and on the novel, composed roughly at the same time. Tihanov asserts that
when read in parallel, these works transmit “with equal ardour, the
opposing values of modern individualism and pre-modern collectivism”.
Thus we arrive at a more nuanced view of Bakhtins’ position, who,
according to Tihanov, wishes to interpret “the history of human views of
the body as a timeless battle between two primordial principles: the
grotesque and the classical.” Bearing this in mind, we can speak of a