{"pk":42954,"title":"The Familial Grotesque in the Poetry of Shirley Geok-lin Lim","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Framing  the representation of the family in Shirley Lim’s poetry against the  concept of the grotesque, this essay aims to demonstrate how the  aesthetic category is arguably enlisted  as a symbol referring to the trope – or more accurately, with  particular members of the family– in order to mount a criticism against  it, or less directly, the Confucian, male-biased symbolic order that  underscores it. That the maternal-figure is most often  transfigured as a grotesque embodiment in Lim’s poems is telling in its  implication of the poet’s own ambivalent feelings towards her own  mother whom she recognizes as a woman who illustrates empowering  individualism but also reprehensibility. As such, while  some of her poems express affirmation of the grotesque’s capacity for  transgressing ideological borders and confusing distinctions, others are  less celebratory of the concept, which they evoke explicitly to clarify  the family’s monstrous dimensions.","language":"en","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0","short_name":"CC BY 4.0","text":"<p>Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.</p>","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0"},"keywords":[{"word":"Shirley Geok-lin Lim"},{"word":"Poetry"},{"word":"the grotesque"},{"word":"family"},{"word":"symbol"},{"word":"Embodiment"},{"word":"empowerment"},{"word":"tradition"},{"word":"ambiguity"},{"word":"maternal figure"},{"word":"transgression"}],"section":"Festschrift: The Poetry and Poetics of Shirley Geok-lin Lim","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0hb42816","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Andrew","middle_name":"Hock Soon","last_name":"Ng","name_suffix":"","institution":"Monash University Malaysia","department":"None"}],"date_submitted":"2019-10-29T14:16:17-07:00","date_accepted":"2019-10-29T14:16:17-07:00","date_published":"2019-12-30T15:19:29-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/jtas/article/42954/galley/32010/download/"}]}