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Rawi Hage COCROACH (intolerance towards immigrants & socio-political…
Rawi Hage COCROACH (intolerance towards immigrants & socio-political satire + grotesque mode)
GROTESQUE
examples - Kafka's "Metamorphosis" (1915), the movie "Freaks" (1932)
The carnavalesque grotesque (Bachtin)
folk grotesque, body (exaggeration), reversal, playful, liberating, temporary
demonic grotesque (Wolfgang Kayser)
nothing to do with laughter, apocalyptic fantasy as a feature >> the protagonist's vision of cockroaches as future rulers of the world
always provocative as a strategy, defamiliarization (Shklovsky!!!), distortion
grotesque >< alienation effect
! mixture of 2 types of the grotesque
Thomson
on the grotesque mode
(1972) "The Grotesque"
fear & shock, wonder
unettles the usual perception of reality ! conginive confusion (Harpham)
fundamnetal element -
disharmony
!
the unreolved nature of the grotesque conflict, the lack of resolution
extravagance, exaggeration
abnormality
the basic definiton - "the unresolved clash of incompatibles in work & responce", "the ambivalently abnormal"
the satiric (!) vs playful grotesque
ANALYSIS
Canada as multicultural, "first postcolonial state"
labanese - a visible minority (skincolour)
>> undeground as the dark place where you can't see the skincolour>> can become invisible as a migrant
settings - 1990s (you should derive it from the allusions)
nameless protagonist
sunlight
>< cocroaches are afraid of it
alienation. Experience of a migrant to be read by non-migrants
dominant culture >
racial "other"
as inferior and undesirable (just as cockroaches)
cockroaches in the future as rulers = carnavalesque "upside down"
"escapism" of cocroaches, by which the protagonist is fascinated
underground as 1) a space of resistance 2) metaphor for unconscious
migrant experience as
liminal
>< he is just partly a cockroach !
Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror. An essay on Abjection (1982)
abject - monstrous object of horror >< animal within, everything corporal, corpse as the strongest abject
fear of the foreigner as the other >< abjection, other >< impurity
protagonist's self-awareness of ppl imagining him as a cockroach ("Yes, I am...")