Ignifying Bodies
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Signifying Bodies
Author: G. Thomas Couser
language: en
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Release Date: 2009-10-22
Sheds new light on the memoir boom by asking: Is the genre basically about disability?
The Signifying Body
Author: Penelope Ingram
language: en
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Release Date: 2009-01-01
How do we live ethically? What role do sex and race play in living or being ethically? Can ethics lead to ontology? Can literature play a role in ethical being? Drawing extensively on the work of Luce Irigaray, Frantz Fanon, and Martin Heidegger, Penelope Ingram argues that ethical questions must be understood in light of ontological ones. It is only when sexual and racial difference are viewed at an ontological level that ethics is truly possible. Central to the connection between ontology and ethics is the role of language. Ingram revisits the relationship between representation and matter in order to advance a theory of material signification. She examines a number of twentieth-century film and literary texts, including Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and Don DeLillo's The Body Artist, to demonstrate that material signification, rather than representation, is crucial to our experience of living authentically and achieving an ethical relation with the Other. By attending closely to Heidegger's, Irigaray's, and Fanon's positions on language, this original work argues that the literary text is indispensable to a "revealing" of the relationship between ontology and ethics, and through it, the reader can experience a state of "authentic Being ethically."
Slave to the Body
Slave to the Body is the first comprehensive study of body-politics in the Old South. The book investigates how black and white, male and female bodies were defined and thereby brought into existence as distinct corporealities. The making and unmaking of Southern bodies took place in a variety of fields such as medicine, sexuality, religion, beauty, fashion, or sports - and it resulted in a hierarchy of corporeality in which blacks were much more embodied than whites, and in which white men and black women marked the opposite poles of this typology of embodiment. The dualism of black hyper-bodies and white no-bodies determined modes of social control. While whites were regulated in modern disembodied ways, slaves were controlled in pre-modern ways via the inflicted flesh. The despotic power whites exercised over blacks was inefficient in many ways, but reformatory experiments failed, because Southern whites were unable to think blacks differently. Images of black hyper-corporeality were so persuasive that white Southerners were incapable of creating less embodied, more efficient and more tolerable modes of control. In this sense, Southern whites were slaves to their own body-texts. Contents: Foucauldian Structuralism - Constitutive Effects of Power - Medical Body: Dissection, Display, Experimentation, Anesthesia - Sexual Body: Reproduction, Eroticism, Maternalism, Artificial Reproduction - Disciplined Body: Temperance, Anti-Dancing-Crusade, Sports - Religious Body: Sin, Salvation - Mirroring Body: Beauty, Fashion, Dandyism - Hierarchy of Embodiment - Function of Body-Texts - Regulative Effects of Power - Declining Importance of the Body - Penal Reform - Modern Bio-Politics - Pre-ModernDespotism - Inefficiency of Despotism - Economic and Social Costs of Subjugation - Threats of War - Breakdown of Despotism.