{"product_id":"9780826210791","title":"American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque","description":"\u003cp\u003eBy synthesizing Kayser's and Bakhtin's views of the grotesque and Heidegger's philosophy of Being, \u003ci\u003eAmerican Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque\u003c\/i\u003e seeks to demonstrate that American fiction from Poe to Pynchon has tried to convey the existential dimension: the pre-individual totality or flow of life, which defines itself against the mind and its linguistic capacity. Dieter Meindl shows how the grotesque, through its self-contradictory nature, has been instrumental in expressing this reality-conception, an antirationalist stance in basic agreement with existential thought. The historical validity of this new metaphysics, which grants precedence to Being—the context of cognition—over the cognizant subject, must be upheld in the face of deconstructive animadversions upon any metaphysics of presence. The notion of decentering the subject, Meindl argues, did not originate with deconstruction. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe existential grotesque confirms the protomodernist character of classic American fiction. Meindl traces its course through a number of well-known texts by Melville, James, Gilman, Anderson, Faulkner, and O'Connor, among others. To convey life conceived as motion, these writers had to capture—that is, immobilize—it in their art: an essentially distortive and, therefore, grotesque device. Melville's \"Bartleby,\" dealing with a \u003ci\u003emort vivant,\u003c\/i\u003e is the seminal text in this mode of indirectness. As opposed to the existential grotesque, which grants access to a preverbal realm, the linguistic grotesque of postmodern fiction works on the assumption that all reality is referable to language in a textual universe.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAmerican Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque\u003c\/i\u003e will significantly alter our understanding of certain traditions in American literature. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Missouri Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47017687646448,"sku":"9780826210791","price":44.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780826210791_p0.jpg?v=1763749943","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780826210791","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}