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Grotesque Body
The grotesque body is a concept, or literary trope, put forward by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his study of François Rabelais' work. The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, the lowering of all that is abstract, spiritual, noble, and ideal to the material level. Through the use of the grotesque body in his novels, Rabelais related political conflicts to human anatomy. In this way, Rabelais used the concept as "a figure of unruly biological and social exchange". It is by means of this information that Bakhtin pinpoints two important subtexts: the first is ''carnival'' (carnivalesque), and the second is ''grotesque realism'' (grotesque body). Thus, in ''Rabelais and His World'' Bakhtin studies the interaction between the social and the literary, as well as the meaning of the body. Carnival The Carnival, or feast of fools, is a religious celebration where people consume copious amounts of food and wine and have a large party to celebrate. The gro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Literary Trope
A literary trope is an artistic effect realized with figurative language – word, phrase, image – such as a figure of speech, rhetorical figure. In editorial practice, a ''trope'' is "a substitution of a word or phrase by a less literal word or phrase". Semantic change has expanded the definition of the literary term ''trope'' to also describe a writer's usage of commonly recurring or overused literary techniques and rhetorical devices (characters and situations), motif (narrative), motifs, and clichés in a work of creative literature. Origins The term ''trope'' derives from the Koine Greek, Greek (), 'a turn, a change', related to the root of the verb (), 'to turn, to direct, to alter, to change'; this means that the term is used metaphorically to denote, among other things, metaphorical language. Tropes and their classification were an important field in Rhetoric, classical rhetoric. The study of tropes has been taken up again in modern criticism, especially in deconstruc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
