Conference article

This paper explores Villy Sørensen’s short story “Duo” and its interest in conceptions of corporeality and embodiment. Many of Sørensen’s short stories and other works are populated with bodies that may be described as abnormal; aberrant; and at times even monstrous. While Sørensen’s bodies are often drawn from the world of folktales and ballads and/or seen as symbolic of psychological and existential conditions (and certainly can be read in this way); one might also read Sørensen’s short stories as indicative of a radical refashioning of the body itself as formed by/forming the 20th century. Indeed one might even argue that Sørensen’s bodies prefigure postmodern concerns with embodiment which sees the body as not so much bounded and delimited in an absolute sense; a container as it were; but rather as fluid; fragmented; penetrated; and dispersed. Such bodies function no longer as natural and familiar objects in the world but as aberrant and disruptive forms that call for and often engage in new and different ways of relating to the world. “Duo” represents just such a text. Here Sørensen explicitly engages Cartesian dualism and opposes this to the encounter of the monstrous body that defies the categorical separation of mind and body. Sørensen explores the inability of the rational to deal with what is inherently absurd. By emphasizing the bodily and corporeal nature of what it means to be human in his short stories; Sørensen underscores the fragmentary and necessarily multiple nature of embodied experience.

No keywords available