The Moral Dilemma in the Social Management of Risks

Dr. Fritzsche offers data seen as demonstrating that irrational fears can lead to grotesque imbalances in social efforts devoted to preventing fatalities

Grotesque in C. Dickens

Introduction grotesque " Real and apparent contradictions abound in discussions of the grotesque; it is an extremely flexible category " , as Geoffrey Galt Harpham reminds us (Harpham article 464). Whoever reads into the bulk of criticism attached to the grotesque will see instability as the first striking characteristic of a concept that Baudelaire called " this indefinable element of beauty […] that obscure and mysterious element " (Baudelaire 132). The purpose of this brief introduction is not to provide an exhaustive survey of the many nuances found in the exegesis of the grotesque, which would necessitate to foray deep into historical, architectural, aesthetic and literary approaches, but to sketch in the theories deemed essential to a correct assessment of the prominence and meaning of the grotesque in the European fiction of the 19 th century. The works of 20 th-century literary critics like Kayser, Bakhtin and Harpham (taken together perhaps) provide a reasonably clear insight into the fundamentally ambivalent concept. The grotesque was theorized in the 19 th century notably by Hugo, Ruskin and Baudelaire, who shed light on the significance of grotesque within Romanticism and Victorian realism. The grotesque famously borrows its name from the accident of the discovery around 1480 of the remains of Nero's Domus Aurea and its elaborate ornaments. Its meaning then gradually expanded from the designation of the decorative grotesque of the Renaissance to what may appear as a vague or all-inclusive category. Critics generally agree, however, on the central idea that the grotesque realizes the either harmonious or hair-raising, but always impossible, fusion of heterogeneous elements. The word has come more prosaically to designate an unexpected mixture of comic and horror or of comic and disgust. Laughter is central-distortion, even carried out to extremities, is not grotesque without laughter. " For an object to be grotesque, it must arouse three responses. Laughter and astonishment are two; either disgust or horror is the third " (Harpham article 463). Harpham's 1976 definition puts to the fore the essential idea that the grotesque originates in the subject of the gaze, that it isn't inherent in the grotesque object. This, Baudelaire had underlined as early as 1855: " Indian and Chinese idols are unaware that they are ridiculous; it is in us, Christians, that their comicality resides. " (Baudelaire 142). And to grasp the impact of the viewer's feeling of estrangement, his (at least initial) impossibility to make sense of the grotesque image, one must also remember that the grotesque emerges in a realistic context: " [The grotesque] threat depends for its effectiveness on the efficacy of the everyday, the partial fulfilment of our usual expectations. We must be believers whose faith has been profoundly shaken but not destroyed; otherwise we lose that fear of life and become resigned to absurdity, fantasy, or death " (Harpham 462).L'article analyse la projection de CD dans son oeuvre comme fantasme de lui-même en citoyen français

The Familial Grotesque in the Poetry of Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Framing the representation of the family in Shirley Lim’s poetry against the concept of the grotesque, this essay aims to demonstrate how the aesthetic category is arguably enlisted as a symbol referring to the trope – or more accurately, with particular members of the family– in order to mount a criticism against it, or less directly, the Confucian, male-biased symbolic order that underscores it. That the maternal-figure is most often transfigured as a grotesque embodiment in Lim’s poems is telling in its implication of the poet’s own ambivalent feelings towards her own mother whom she recognizes as a woman who illustrates empowering individualism but also reprehensibility. As such, while some of her poems express affirmation of the grotesque’s capacity for transgressing ideological borders and confusing distinctions, others are less celebratory of the concept, which they evoke explicitly to clarify the family’s monstrous dimensions

The satiric grotesque in Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

This paper surveys the grotesque which takes a principal position in the American literature since the nineteenth to the present. It outlines the evolution of grotesque from art to literary form, and its meaning that is combined from different critical works. Moreover, it describes the grotesque from the gothic to the textual analysis of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque which is a short fiction by Edgar Allen Poe as a key literary w riter in the ground of the grotesque. He appears as a groundbreaking writer in the nineteenth century American literature and a fruitful influence on his followers. His grotesques are not as common as his gothic stories because the former ones are of a humorous and unusual character when compared to his other stories. In fact, his grotesques fall into the territory o f satirical grotesque

GROTESQUE: Noisy Group Testing (Quick and Efficient)

Group-testing refers to the problem of identifying (with high probability) a (small) subset of $D$ defectives from a (large) set of $N$ items via a "small" number of "pooled" tests. For ease of presentation in this work we focus on the regime when D = \cO{N^{1-\gap}} for some \gap > 0. The tests may be noiseless or noisy, and the testing procedure may be adaptive (the pool defining a test may depend on the outcome of a previous test), or non-adaptive (each test is performed independent of the outcome of other tests). A rich body of literature demonstrates that $\Theta(D\log(N))$ tests are information-theoretically necessary and sufficient for the group-testing problem, and provides algorithms that achieve this performance. However, it is only recently that reconstruction algorithms with computational complexity that is sub-linear in $N$ have started being investigated (recent work by \cite{GurI:04,IndN:10, NgoP:11} gave some of the first such algorithms). In the scenario with adaptive tests with noisy outcomes, we present the first scheme that is simultaneously order-optimal (up to small constant factors) in both the number of tests and the decoding complexity (\cO{D\log(N)} in both the performance metrics). The total number of stages of our adaptive algorithm is "small" (\cO{\log(D)}). Similarly, in the scenario with non-adaptive tests with noisy outcomes, we present the first scheme that is simultaneously near-optimal in both the number of tests and the decoding complexity (via an algorithm that requires \cO{D\log(D)\log(N)} tests and has a decoding complexity of {${\cal O}(D(\log N+\log^{2}D))$}. Finally, we present an adaptive algorithm that only requires 2 stages, and for which both the number of tests and the decoding complexity scale as {${\cal O}(D(\log N+\log^{2}D))$}. For all three settings the probability of error of our algorithms scales as \cO{1/(poly(D)}.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figure

Grotesque and Scenography. Virtual reconstruction of anthropomorphic supports within the entry of Philip II in Antwerp (1549)

This paper aims to analyse the presence of a motif from the Flemish repertoire of the grotesque in the configuration of a unique type of anthropomorphic support used in the ephemeral architecture erected on Philip II of Spain’s entry into Antwerp in 1549. The support consists of a figure that, resembling an atlante or a caryatid, supports a cornice, but whose peculiarity is that the body is partially embedded in the surface of the façade, fulfilling a more decorative function than strictly tectonic. The development of this analysis is based on the concept of visual culture, but this approach also constitutes an attempt for developing a virtual reconstruction of this particular motif in its artistic context.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional andalucía Tech

Grotesque representations of deviant sexuality in Ian McEwan's selected short stories

Themes of sexuality, particularly in excessive and extraordinary forms, can readily merge into the grotesque to ameliorate their depiction and thematic impact. Ian McEwan’s early fiction best exemplifies such inclinations. The psychologically violent and excessive world of McEwan’s early fiction is basically conceived in the milieu of sex and through grotesque representations. In this relation, the present work selectively focuses on “Solid Geometry” from First Love, last Rites (1975) and “Reflections of a kept Ape” and “Dead as they Come” from In between the Sheets (1978) to illustrate the implication and range of the grotesque in McEwan’s short fiction. The selected stories are discussed for their portrayal of the grotesque, as represented through transgressive partnership and deviant sexuality. The portrayal of sexuality in McEwan’s early short fiction offers a variety of the grotesque types of narrative mingling the mode both with the fantastic and the caricature

Game of Thrones: imagined world combines romantic and grotesque visions of Middle Ages

OU historian Richard Marsden examines how longstanding assumptions about the Middle Ages have shaped the world presented in HBO's Gamer of Throne