Hasta la vista, hero: The grotesque image in Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis,' 'Fight Club', and the 'Terminator' films (James Cameron, Jonathan Mostow, David Fincher, Franz Kafka, Austria)

The grotesque image intermingles aspects of images often kept apart in separate categories. For example, grotesque images include representations of hermaphrodites that interweave biological male and female, and science fiction cyborgs that blend human flesh with machine. These images exist in classical mythology (i.e. Ovid's Metamorphoses), in the medieval era in Dante's Inferno, in modern literature in Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," and in contemporary film in Fight Club and The Terminator. The iconoclastic grotesque image is defined by its ambiguity and undermines polarized constructs of so-called reality: male/female, animal/human, good/evil, human/machine.; This dissertation applies four interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives to analyze grotesque images in modern and contemporary literature and film. Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin describes the grotesque as an image of the unfinished and imperfect being. James Hillman's work on the pathologized image suggests that the grotesque image demonstrates psyche's autonomous ability to instill suffering and limitation. Furthermore, one's perspective on life is distinctively different when seen through the lens of the grotesque image as opposed to the heroic image.; The grotesque image is further explored through Sigmund Freud's essay on the unheimlich (uncanny). He associates uncanny feelings with repressed aspects of psyche and the death instinct. The grotesque image is also associated with the abject, a pre-subject/pre-object phase of infantile psychological development described by French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. These psychoanalytic perspectives link the grotesque image to the disordered and fragmented unconscious.; These four theoretical perspectives are used to interpret grotesque imagery in Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," Fight Club, and the three Terminator films. Kafka's character---Gregor Samsa, a man turned vermin, is emblematic of the heroic ego radically introduced to suffering, limitation, and death. In Fight Club, the heroic life of the narrator is splintered through repeated encounters with numerous grotesque characters embodying the doppelganger, ambiguous gender, sexuality, and mortality. The Terminator films introduce multiple variations on the grotesque figure of the cyborg, obscuring distinct categories of time, gender, life/death, and human/machine. The heroic ego's tenuous monocentric hold on psyche is shown time and again to be undermined by the polycentric essence of grotesque images.