Literature of the Grotesque

In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the grotesque—the exaggerated, the excessive, the strange, and the malformed—lowers what is elevated and elevates what is low, collapsing distinctions between sacred and profane, ruler and fool, and purity and decay. This course thinks about how writers use bodily excess, absurdity, satire, parody, and degradation to challenge authority, expose hypocrisy, and reassert collective vitality. Rather than presenting the grotesque as merely monstrous or nihilistic, we ask how it becomes regenerative: How does degradation produce rebirth? How does laughter dismantle power? How does the body resist abstraction? From Renaissance carnival to modern absurdism, students investigate the grotesque as a mode of social imagination, with readings from François Rabelais, Nikolai Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Angela Carter.