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Literary Alchemy and Elemental Wordsmithery: Linking the Sublime and the Grotesque in Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Gardner, Stacy L
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6808-8040
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=odu148007888468904

Abstract Details

2016, M.A. (Master of Arts in English), Ohio Dominican University, English.
Despite numerous theories over the last few centuries and ample scholarship exploring the sublime and the grotesque as independent elements in literature, scholars seem to have ignored linking these two elements in their analyses of and critical responses to the modern novel. Little scholarship exists to decipher and to support why together the grotesque and the sublime are essential characteristics of the modern novel—specifically, Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)—and how they become necessary in tandem to illuminate the human condition, to personify the Other, and to evaluate Mick Kelly’s Bildungsroman. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers cultivates these qualities to create the perfect amalgam of timeless despair and loneliness amidst the struggle to survive. The Other, like the sublime and the grotesque, highlights simultaneously the oppositions and the similarities in people only to suggest that people become the Other when this examination occurs, while the human condition, like the sublime and the grotesque, yields many definitions, theories, and differences, but as these conditions materialize, they significantly affect responses to stimuli and to people and provoke readers to consider why humans are the way they are and why they behave as they do. In order to establish these links and continue a discussion regarding their use in tandem, Chapter 1 explicates the theories of Victor Hugo and Thomas Mann, two writers who see purpose in the unification of the grotesque and the sublime in modern literature, and connects these theories in terms of McCullers’s characters, landscapes, and situations. Chapter 2 focuses on the novel’s female teenage Other Mick Kelly and the unpredictability of her adolescence and employs Hugo’s and Mann’s theories to inspect Kelly’s experiences, uniting the grotesque and the sublime within Kelly's Bildungsroman. Chapter 3 briefly defines the Other and identifies some of McCullers’s male characters who most exemplify the Other—John Singer, Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, and Jake Blount—and analyzes their relationships and supports the idea that Other also unifies the grotesque and the sublime. Chapter 4 presents four theories of the human condition and evaluates similar conditions found in the novel, further supporting the belief that the grotesque, the sublime, the Other, and the human condition all represent literary elemental dependents in a modern novel. The conclusion considers Robert C. Wiles’s photograph The Most Beautiful Suicide as a modern visual example, thereby depicting a link between the sublime and the grotesque.
Jeremy Glazier, MFA (Advisor)
Martin Brick, PhD (Other)
102 p.
American Literature; Literature; Modern Literature
Linking sublime and grotesque; Victor Hugo; Thomas Mann; Carson McCullers; The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; modernism; Bildungsroman; adolescence; the Other; the female teenage Other; the human condition; Southern landscape; modern theories

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Gardner, S. L. (2016). Literary Alchemy and Elemental Wordsmithery: Linking the Sublime and the Grotesque in Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter [Master's thesis, Ohio Dominican University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=odu148007888468904

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Gardner, Stacy. Literary Alchemy and Elemental Wordsmithery: Linking the Sublime and the Grotesque in Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter . 2016. Ohio Dominican University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=odu148007888468904.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Gardner, Stacy. "Literary Alchemy and Elemental Wordsmithery: Linking the Sublime and the Grotesque in Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter ." Master's thesis, Ohio Dominican University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=odu148007888468904

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by Ohio Dominican University and OhioLINK.