This study examines how hunger narratives and performances
contribute to a reconsideration of neglected or prohibited domains
of thinking which only a full confrontation with the body's
heterogeneity and plasticity can reveal. From literary motif or
psychosomatic symptom to revolutionary gesture or existential
malady, the double crux of hunger and disgust is a powerful force
which can define the experience of embodiment. Kafka's fable of the
"Hunger Artist" offers a matrix for the fast, while its surprising
last-page revelation introduces disgust as a correlative of
abstinence, conscious or otherwise. Grounded in Kristeva's theory
of abjection, the figure of the fraught body lurking at the heart
of the negative grotesque gathers precision throughout this study,
where it is employed in a widening series of contexts: suicide
through overeating, starvation as self-performance or political
resistance, the teratological versus the totalitarian, the anorexic
harboring of death. In the process, writers and artists as diverse
as Herman Melville, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Christina Rossetti,
George Orwell, Knut Hamsun, J.M. Coetzee, Cindy Sherman, Pieter
Breughel, Marina Abramovic, David Nebreda, Paul McCarthy, and
others are brought into the discussion. By looking at the different
acts of visceral, affective, and ideological resistance performed
by the starving body, this book intensifies the relationship
between hunger and disgust studies while offering insight into the
modalities of the "dark grotesque" which inform the aesthetics and
politics of hunger. It will be of value to anyone interested in the
culture, politics, and subjectivity of embodiment, and scholars
working within the fields of disgust studies, food studies,
literary studies, cultural theory, and media studies.
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