Cotton, Nicola; (2001) Reviewing otherness: Representations and theories of ugliness in modern French culture. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This dissertation explores the issue of ugliness in modem French culture. Within a broad framework of the relation between the self and the other, it seeks to answer the following questions: what is ugliness? how is it perceived? where is it found? why is it important? In contrast to traditional ideas about ugliness, where it is seen merely as beauty's opposite, the discussion focuses on areas of literature, art and theoretical debate in which the ugly warrants attention on its own, more positive terms. To this end, five distinct areas of study are proposed as follows: 1. Caricature as 'the art of ugliness'. The deployment of ugliness as a political weapon and as a means of negotiating social identity in emerging bourgeois culture after 1789. 2. The nose as support for the architecture of the face and as the cornerstone for a topography of human history where the world is seen as a face. Exceptional noses as points of radical discontinuity in totalising narratives of the collective self. 3. The turning point for ugliness in France. Romantic aesthetics and the movement of the ugly from the 'ridiculous' to the sublime. 4. The role of ugliness in the precarious domain of existential identity. The revelation, through ugliness-related nausea, of contingency. Sartre's theory of the Other and the alienation of the self by means of 'the look'. 5. Ugliness as a gendered negative value positioned on the side of women. Feminist re-consideration and re-writing of that situation as a way of revaluing ugliness - and women themselves - positively. The approach adopted does not claim to give an exhaustive account of ugliness; rather, it offers a series of perspectives which together indicate the strategic importance and cultural significance of the ugly in France from the 17th century to the present.

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