The corporality poetics in the American literature of the 19th-20th centuries

Abstract

The article examines the poetic means of corporality expression in the literary and medical discourse of the American literature. The author traced the transformation of the paradigm of human corporality in the US prose of the 19th – 20th centuries. The category of corporality as a way of self-awareness and perception of the world is one of the key aesthetic and philosophical concepts which determines the man’s existence and consciousness. The study of the problem of corporality and its representation in fiction reveals the peculiarities of the author’s worldview in a particular literary work, a literary direction and national outlook in general, which determines the relevance of the research. The study is the first attempt to analyze the specific features in the embodiment of the corporality category in the literary and medical discourse of the US prose in diachrony. The paradigm of corporality in the literary and medical discourse of the US prose is based on the categories of the beautiful and the ugly, health and disease, norm and pathology. The study found that from the second half of the 19th century, the category of corporality has undergone a series of artistic transformations that have been reflected in the literary and medical discourse of the US prose. The corporality poetics in the US prose of the 19th – 20th centuries demonstrates the following narrative modifications: the body as an inherently inviolable carrier of the human existence; the marginalized body with congenital or acquired disabilities as a means of exposing the societal defects; the body as a testing ground for medical experiments; the motive of fear to lose the autonomy of the body as a metaphor for deprivation of one’s own “I”; reduction of individual characteristics of the body by means of metonymical replacement.