6533b824fe1ef96bd1281234

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Disease and Anti-Naturalism in Raymond Carver's “Fat” and “A Small, Good Thing” and David Lynch's Blue Velvet

subject

description

International audience; This paper does not explore possible references to Carver in Lynch's films, but offers a comparative study of their representations of disease. Based primarily on a play between metonymy and metaphor, this aesthetic of contamination contributes to a critical discourse on naturalist thought. The first form of “anti-naturalism” is the deconstruction of what calls Charles Taylor “disengaged reason.” The second form is the questioning of the very “idea of nature.” These artists adopt what Clément Rosset calls an “artificialist” standpoint, the subject and the body being shaped, as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler would have it, by normative discourses and techniques. Considered, then, as a discursive relation of contiguity, disease would be, in effect, a metonymy.