Freakish Matters: Towards an Aesthetics of the Grotesque in American Culture

怪诞的事情：迈向美国文化中的怪诞美学

• 批准号: 244851877
• 负责人: Dr. Susanne Hamscha
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Department of English and Comparative Literature
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Fellowships
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2012-12-31 至 2014-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/244851877?language=en
• 关键词: Freakish; Matters; Towards; Aesthetics; Grotesque

My Postdoc-project will be situated at the crossroads of American studies, body studies, and moral philosophy, embedded within a framework of ethical questions concerning the ways human lives are framed and come to matter. More specifically, I will investigate the legibility and intelligibility of human life by scrutinizing the (by normal standards) disfigured or anomalous body, which continuously resists interpretation and explanation, in order to analyze if the grotesque body can be theorized according to its own logics and measures, beyond regimes of normalization. To this end, I will look at visual representations of freaks in 19th- and 20th-century American human zoos, dime museums, film and photography, as the paradigm of inexplicable bodies and unintelligible human lives. Focusing on the film Freaks by Tod Browning, advertisements and posters for P.T. Barnum's American Museum, photographs by freak portraitists Mathew Brady, Charles Eisenmann, and Diane Arbus, lithographs by the American printmakers Currier and Ives, as well as the freaks' own cartes de visite, my project will investigate the ways in which the exhibition and display of the disfigured body, the affective relation between exhibit and audience, and the logics of a freakish bodily ontology intersect. Focusing on the social contingency and materiality of the freakish body, my project wants to devise explanatory paradigms that enable us to decipher and describe the illegible and unintelligible freakish body by shifting the frames of the human.

我的博士后项目将位于美国研究，身体研究和道德哲学的十字路口，嵌入有关人类生活方式的伦理问题框架内。更具体地说，我将研究人类生活的易读性和可理解性，通过仔细检查（按正常标准）毁容或异常的身体，它不断抵制解释和解释，以分析是否可以根据自己的逻辑和措施，超越规范化制度的怪诞的身体理论化。为此，我将研究19世纪和20世纪美国人类动物园、廉价博物馆、电影和摄影中怪胎的视觉表现，作为无法解释的身体和无法理解的人类生活的范例。以托德·布朗宁的电影《怪胎》为中心，为P. T.巴纳姆的美国博物馆，由怪胎肖像画家马修布雷迪，查尔斯艾森曼，和黛安阿布斯的照片，由美国版画家柯里尔和伊韦斯石版画，以及怪胎自己的cartes de visite，我的项目将调查如何展览和展示毁容的身体，展览和观众之间的情感关系，和一个怪胎身体本体论的逻辑交叉。我的项目聚焦于畸形身体的社会偶然性和物质性，希望设计出解释性的范式，使我们能够通过改变人类的框架来破译和描述难以辨认和难以理解的畸形身体。