The Culture of Corporeality

"The Culture of Corporeality" outlines acultural history of the body in the American postwar years (1945-1960), based on contemporary critical theory and exemplified by a variety of films, literary works, and other documents. The book argues that the body, as a cultural, symbolic, and lived entity, was strategically foregrounded during this era, pervading discourses such as literature, cinema, television, music, the visual arts, architecture, design, medicine, and philosophy. As demonstrated in close analyses of works by James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Allen Ginsberg, and J. D. Salinger, cultural concepts of the body keep reinventing and reforming themselves through the exploration of boundaries. This complex interaction between text and environment may result in a justification of the dominant value system or in a dismantlement of cultural oppositions. By exploring the intricate strategies of embodiment used in canonic texts, the study wants to contribute to current debates concerning the aesthetics and function of the body in the context of cultural processes of self-fashioning.