Freaks in late modernist American culture : Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Freaks in late modernist American culture : Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers
（Modern American literature / Yoshinobu Hakutani, general editor, v. 47）
Peter Lang, c2006
- : hbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [161]-172) and index
HTTP:URL=http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip054/2004027475.html Information=Table of contents
Contents of Works
- Degeneration, anti-semitism, and the enfreakment of modernism
- Nathanael West's aspiring freakish flâneurs
- "Well of course, I used to be absolutely gorgeous dear": the female interviewer as subject/object in Djuna Barnes' journalism
- Heredity, transvestism, and the limits of self-fashioning in Nightwood
- Horror, melodrama, and mutable masculine identity in Tod Browning's films
- Louis B. Mayer and the threat of mutable masculine identity
- "This thing I long for I know not what" : Carson McCullers and the melodrama of the domesticated freak
- Conclusion : deviance, defiance, and the problem of "weirdness"
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms « late modernist freakish aesthetics - a creative fusion of « high and « low themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about « freaks by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about « freaks defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity.
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