Gretchen E. Henderson

التاريخ الثقافي للقباحة

"'Ugly as sin', 'ugly duckling', 'rear its ugly head'. The word 'ugly' is used freely, yet it is a loaded term: from the simply plain and unsightly to the repulsive and even offensive, definitions slide all over the place. Hovering around 'feared and dreaded', ugliness both repels and fascinates. But the concept of ugliness has a lineage that has long haunted our cultural imagination. Gretchen E. Henderson explores perceptions of ugliness through history, from ancient Roman feasts to medieval grotesque gargoyles, from Mary Shelley's monster cobbled from corpses to the Nazi Exhibition of Degenerate Art. Covering literature, art, music and even Uglydolls, Henderson reveals how ugliness has long posed a challenge to aesthetics and taste. Henderson digs into the muck of ugliness, moving beyond the traditional philosophic argument or mere opposition to beauty, and emerges with more than a selection of fascinating tidbits. Following ugly bodies and dismantling ugly senses across periods and continents, [this book] draws on a wealth of fields to cross cultures and times, delineating the changing map of ugliness as it charges the public imagination. Illustrated with a range of artefacts, this book offers a refreshing perspective that moves beyond the surface to ask what 'ugly' truly is, even as its meaning continues to shift"--

A Cultural History

Ugliness

Cirkinligin Kültürel Tarihi

Traces of many books mask themselves inside Gretchen E. Henderson's Galerie de Difformite. With the head of a novel and the body of a poem, this extraordinary work interrogates the nuanced concepts of ability/disability, voyeurism/exhibition, deformity/normality--all with a wry sense of self-representational humor. A lineage that bequeaths mysterious relics to an unsuspecting recipient, led through a textual labyrinth by Bea: a deformed reincarnation of Dante's muse. The story-within-a-story takes shape through the mysterious "Undertaker"--a perhaps reanimated-yet-disabled Beatrice, intertwined with the contemporary Gloria Heys and the presumed publisher, Gretchen E. Henderson. An infamous brotherhood called Ye Ugly Face Clubb. Lushly designed with crowdsourced images, text deconstructions, and enough narrative tomfoolery to make Tristram Shandy blush, the Galerie is both funhouse and curiosity cabinet, art catalogue and "choose your own adventure." This bestiary of the novel-as-poem-as-essayas- art grows outside of the bounds of the Book and, in the process, redefines deformity for the digital millennium.

Gretchen E. Henderson

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