Content area
Full Text
James Goodwin. Modern American Grotesque: Literature and Photography. Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 2009. xi + 225 pp. [$49.95] cloth.
Anyone interested in analyzing Flannery O'Connor as a visual artist in relation to her literary art would do well to look for inspiration within James Goodwin's book on the grotesque. As Goodwin reviews the history of grotesque art and literature-and, in the twentieth century, the rise of grotesque photography-he presents a series of theoretical and philosophical understandings of what the grotesque is and how it works. Some of the perspectives Goodwin brings in are quite refreshing, as when he references Oscar Wilde: "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible" (qtd. in Goodwin 45). My major difficulties in reading this study are in separating what Goodwin thinks the grotesque could be at its best from what he thinks it too often is and separating Goodwin's thoughts from those of others. Nevertheless, there is plenty here to study. I believe that Goodwin wants grotesque art to be tied to the real, to ideas, to some form of social protest: he says his book "aligns the modem grotesque with conventions of depiction and description in the arts and . . . recognizes its referential ground and its oppositional functions in regard to society's orthodoxies" (9).
The major writers and works considered here...