Cultural debates around the grotesque body: between reality and fantasy

Abstract

This note by Andrés Ibarra Cordero shares his reflections on the grotesque genre in literature in order to argue that certain cultural notions of loss and/or transformation of identity could be attributed to features of the grotesque body. The textual representation of the grotesque body in literary works (examples of Poe and Kafka are given as emblematic cases) makes it possible for the real world to merge with fantasy, revealing the materiality of the body in its transformations and identity mismatches.