Abstract
Crash’s philosophical and aesthetic focus on the wounded body has led to it being described by many of its readers as repulsive, disgusting, nauseating, and in other similarly visceral vocabulary. It has also, however, been praised in the highest terms for its perceived exploration and criticism of postmodernity, technofetishism, and the advertising industry, along with its estrangement of society’s acceptance of the automobile age and its mutilation of our landscape, psyche and bodies. Critics of Crash who wish to portray the novel positively frequently appear under pressure to defang this aspect of it, attempting to domesticate Crash’s troubling‘low’ matter by the aforementioned ‘higher‘ aesthetic or moral cause. Crash, however, eludes this manner of simplification; the novel cannot be adequately analysed by shirking from its embodied effects. A chimaeric fusion of opposing experiential and interpretive catalysts, Crash refuses to be statically categorised.
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© 2018 Ciarán Kavanagh, published De Gruyter Open
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