'Skin-Deep' Impressions: Somatic Sense in an Age of Simulated Significance illuminates a variety of bodily modes of expression, ranging from body-art and popular body-fixation, over body-mutilation, body-play, and self-mutilation, to psycho-somatic patterns of behaviour. The question governing the work concerns the extent to which the physical orientation, currently characterizing our society, is to be considered a productive response to the so-called "crisis of representation." / A reading of Kerstin Ekinan's novel Blackwater (1996) is woven into and through the body of the work, indicating the shortcomings of theoretical understanding, the limitations of literary analysis, and the strength of literary narrative with respect to the issue in question. The distinction traditionally drawn between fashionable, transgressive and pathological ways of turning toward the body no longer holds. The blurring of the boundaries between self-making and self-destruction opens for a rather unexplored field of possibilities. / 'Skin-Deep' Impressions takes as its point of departure the claim made by some postmodern thinkers, that the cultural climate in the Western part of the world has turned "schizophrenic." The enthusiasm with which the arrival of the "schizo" has been received, ironically and tragically, is out of touch with reality. The suggestion emerging from my work is that the bodily phenomenon serves as a request for the reinstitution of more common frames of reference. The focus on the texture of the flesh, on physical wounds, and on the experience of physical pain, is viewed not as a manifestation of a general sense of victimization but rather, as the manifestation of a need to reinvent forms of representation allowing for the realization of emotionally intense and often ambiguous experience. The violent turn toward the body, finally, is viewed as a collective means of coping with the social unconscious, that is with the guilt associated with the crimes committed in the name of progress in the Western world. In this manner, physicality comes to substitute for what is lacking, namely a more suitable metaphysics. Paradoxically then, body-fixated subjects, commonly perceived as being self-absorbed and asocial may in fact represent a most serious attempt at introducing respect for other living beings in a culture characterized by an increasingly split between notions of humanity and conditions of living.

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x, 197 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation investigates the cultural importance of the "monstrous Other" in postmodern literature, including novels from Sweden, Finland, and the United States. While the theoretical concept of "the Other" is in wide circulation in the humanities and social sciences, the concept has only recently been modified with the adjective "monstrous" to highlight a special case of the Other that plays an important role in the formation of human subjectivity. In order to better understand the representational legacy of the monstrous Other, I explore some of the principal venues in which it has appeared in western literature, philosophy, folklore, and politics. Using a Foucauldian archaeological approach in my literature survey allows me to trace the tradition of the monstrous Other in such sources as medieval bestiaries, the wild man motif in folklore and popular culture, and the medicalization of intersexual embodiment. In all cases, the monstrous Other is a complex phenomenon with broad implications for the politics of subjectivity and the future of social and political justice. Moreover, the monstrous Other poses significant challenges for the ongoing tenability of normative notions of the human, including such primary human traits as sexuality and a gendered, "natural" embodiment. Given the complexities of the monstrous Other and the ways in which it both upholds and intervenes in normative human identities, no single theoretical approach is adequate to the task of examining its functioning. Instead, the project calls for an approach that blends the methodologies of (post)psychoanalytic and queer theory while retaining a critical awareness of both the representational nature of subjectivity and its material effects. By employing both strains of theory, I am able to "read" the monstrous Other as both a necessary condition of subjectivity and a model of intersubjectivity that could provide an alternative to the positivism and binarism of normative subjectivity. The texts that I examine here reveal the ways in which postmodern reconfigurations of the monstrous Other challenge the (hetero)normativity of human subjectivity and its hierarchical forms of differentiation. My reading of these texts locates the possibilities for a hybridized, cyborgian existence beyond the outermost limits of positivistic, western subjectivity. / Committee in charge: Ellen Rees, Chairperson, German and Scandinavian; Daniel Wojcik, Member, English; Jenifer Presto, Member, Comparative Literature; Aletta Biersack, Outside Member, Anthropology