The Grotesque World in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

This article is going to explore the reasons leading the figures grotesque and the way out of such world, with the help of Bakhtin’s theory of grotesque realism, via linking the duality of physical part with the grotesque to analyze the three main characters’ physical characteristics, social relationships and mental world. Singer, Mick and Biff are the distinct characters in Carson McCullers’s novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Their lives are shot through with frustration and discouragement and the intense privacy of their inner lives gives the reader the impression that they are isolated, lonely beings. They try to build connections with others but eventually they fail. The following are the reasons: Firstly, they cannot identify themselves with the majority due to their physical problems, which further lead to their mental crisis. Secondly, they are alienated from the majority in society while they communicate with the ones who cannot end their isolation, which enforces their alienation. Finally, loneliness grips them so powerfully that they cannot come out of their grotesque dreaming world centering on the truth or idea or purpose they have created for themselves. Therefore the way out is to experience the social reality, to express ideas, share care and love with others. Through the interpretation of this novel, the point of this article is to explain the reasons and the ways out of alienation, the keyword in the grotesque world.

Writing the Grotesque in Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones"

In her work, Jesmyn Ward has revitalized the Southern Gothic tradition and its tropes to better reflect the realities of Black American life in the 21st century. This essay explores the reconfiguration of the grotesque body in Ward's sophomore novel, Salvage the Bones, which follows an impoverished Black family in Mississippi in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. In contrast to her literary predecessors, Ward defines the grotesque as a state of debility imposed on Black bodies and then deemed uniquely problematic to them as a class and race, rather than the result of centuries of structural oppression. As such, she understands the trope as encompassing far more than bodily or intellectual difference, the way in which it was previously utilized by Southern writers like William Faulkner and Carson McCullers. Instead, Ward theorizes the grotesque as a biopolitical state, in which populations that do not conform to the status quo, and specifically the dominant capitalist mode of production and consumption, are driven to the margins and their lives deemed expendable.

The fugue - music as a euphemism in the works of Carson McCullers and Emiliya Dvoriyanova

In Women in the House of Fiction Lorna Sage writes: "…the novels too treated the domain of character and representation as the place where the 'others' lived, playing their parts and acting out their roles…" (Sage 1992: viii). Sage investigates the impact women writers have had on post-war fiction employing that every novelist tries to probe the boundaries of fiction, to "voice" their views and positions through the language of literature. Using Henry James's metaphor of fiction as a house, however, Sage is indebted to one of the writers she read and wrote about – Angela Carter. It was Sage, as the first-ever critic to discuss Carter's works thoroughly, who noticed that houses are unable to endure holding the woman and her transgressive power at bay. All houses, castles, buildings, every entity that stands for patriarchal power, are eventually destroyed. Sage reads this as an attack from women novelists against their literary inheritance (Sage 1992: ix). Womanhood is a topic widely outspoken and deeply problematic. Each text takes on different ways to construct, deconstruct, explain and see the woman, her body, her role: in society, history, culture. I argue that women writers project a certain amount of personal experience into the fictional worlds they create - an approach Ellen Moers had in Literary Women and her reading of Frankenstein as Merry Shelly's personified trauma of giving birth. My paper outlines cultural contexts as relevant to the works of different writers. It traces how intentional or non-intentional intertextuality connects texts and motifs; my article seeks to answer how different cultural contexts brought about similar problems. To complete the outlined goals, I rely on close reading of particular texts.

Inceptions

The beginning is both internal and external to the text it initiates, and that non-coincidence points to the text’s vexed relation with its outside. Hence the non-trivial self-reflexivity of any textual beginning, which must bear witness to the self-grounding quality of the literary work—its inability either to comprise its inception or to externalize it in an authorizing exteriority. In a different but related way does the fact that they must render our lives and our desires opaque to us; what Freud called “latency” marks not only sexuality but human thought with a self-division shaped by asynchronicity. From Henry James’s New York Edition prefaces to George Eliot’s epigraphs, from Ovid’s play with meter to Charles Dickens’s thematizing of the ex nihilo emergence of character, from Wallace Stevens’s abstract consideration of poetic origins to James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty’s descriptions of queer childhood, writers repeatedly confront the problem of inception. Most explicitly for James, for whom revision, a striving to keep the work perpetually at the border of its emergence, was a fundamentally ethical practice, attention to inception is a commitment to human freedom; a similar commitment is legible in all the writers examined here. To experience this vibrancy, the sense that the work might have been, might still yet be, otherwise, it suffices, James reminds us, to reread it. Inceptions traces an ethics of reading, that follows from perceiving, in the ostensibly finished forms of lives and texts, the potentiality inherent in their having started forth.

Carson McCullers’s ‘Look Homeward, Americans’ (1940)

Chapter 11 takes a short essay by Carson McCullers as the basis for a discussion of America’s national trait of being ‘homesick most for the places we have never known’. It considers this phenomenon with reference to the writings of Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald who made nostalgic wonder part of the American vernacular. It also draws a comparison between the forward-looking nostalgia McCullers analyses and Robert Sherwood’s 1935 play The Petrified Forest in which the young heroine dreams of returning to a home she has never known. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—‘a veritable Ulysses of the black experience’—and a short story by McCullers called ‘The Aliens’, both of which urge a mature, hopeful, and inward-facing quest for ‘the homeness of home’.

The Rise of the Conspicuously Young Novelist

This essay illuminates the history of what David Foster Wallace dubbed the “conspicuously young” novelist (CYN), drawing on a series of brief case studies (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Radiguet, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Sylvia Plath, and James Baldwin) that demonstrate how certain CYNs were marketed and represented in advertising and journalistic discourse. In the process, it traces the construction of a number of ostensibly meritocratic—but in practice highly inequitable—institutions that functioned to identify, sponsor, and promote young writers. Finally, this essay examines the pervasive critical rhetoric of “promise,” which offers the key to understanding the dynamic of hype and disappointment immanent to each “younger generation” of CY writers.

NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVES IN THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER BY CARSON MCCULLERS

Spiritual isolation and loneliness have always been the main topic of the works of the southern American writer Carson McCullers. Her superb literary creation lies in that, she not only integrates the theme of loneliness between lines of her works, but also strongly echoes and deepens that theme by use of brilliant narrative skills. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is such a masterpiece on loneliness, decorated and permeated with exquisite narrative strategy. By means of the narrative theories of Gérard Genette and Shen Dan, and with NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE as the starting point, the present paper tries to study the unique narrative strategy framed within this work. This paper points out that, McCullers’ portray of characters from many aspects, and her narration from multiple perspectives in this work, not only greatly exalt the work’s narrative tension and aesthetic effect, but also deeply reflect the internal perplexity and solitary state of mind of those people living in American South after the Civil War.

Happy objects and cruel optimism in Carson McCullers’ story ‘Correspondence’

This article discusses American author Carson McCullers’ 1942 short story titled ‘Correspondence’, in order to consider how the unique form of the epistolary short story amplifies themes of alienation and absence. Drawing upon contemporary affect theory as well as a close reading of the story, I consider how the letters in the text can be understood as what Sara Ahmed describes as ‘happy objects’, as well as how the process of letter writing becomes exemplary of Lauren Berlant’s theorization of cruel optimism. Based on her own disappointment with letters and letter writing, McCullers’ short text problematizes the act of writing letters and demonstrates the complexities of epistolary short fiction.