Radical Modernism and Sexuality

Radical Modernism and Sexuality PDF Author: David Seelow
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781403966292
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
In this bold, sweeping reassessment of Modernism, Seelow challenges standard versions of postmodernism and proposes a notion of radical modernism. He presents a provocative thesis through stimulating reconsiderations of three related but different radical moderns: Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and D.H. Lawrence. Defining sexuality as Modernism's core feature, Seelow situates Freud, Reich, and Lawrence as frontier thinkers. Starting with a history of sexuality as both phenomenon and field of study Seelow then discloses Freud's theory of sexuality's masochistic underpinnings. Reich's materialist thought, which radicalizes Freud's libido theory while fashioning an emancipatory sense of self, is also offered. Radical theories also illuminate Lady Chatterley's Lover, and many of Lawrence's great short works. Finally, Seelow, following Kristeva's recent work, stresses the value of revolt in preserving the life of the mind in a morally devalued world.

Radical Modernism and Sexuality

Radical Modernism and Sexuality PDF Author: David Seelow
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781403966292
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
In this bold, sweeping reassessment of Modernism, Seelow challenges standard versions of postmodernism and proposes a notion of radical modernism. He presents a provocative thesis through stimulating reconsiderations of three related but different radical moderns: Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and D.H. Lawrence. Defining sexuality as Modernism's core feature, Seelow situates Freud, Reich, and Lawrence as frontier thinkers. Starting with a history of sexuality as both phenomenon and field of study Seelow then discloses Freud's theory of sexuality's masochistic underpinnings. Reich's materialist thought, which radicalizes Freud's libido theory while fashioning an emancipatory sense of self, is also offered. Radical theories also illuminate Lady Chatterley's Lover, and many of Lawrence's great short works. Finally, Seelow, following Kristeva's recent work, stresses the value of revolt in preserving the life of the mind in a morally devalued world.

Radical Modernism and Sexuality

Radical Modernism and Sexuality PDF Author: David Donald Seelow
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Modernism (Literature)
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description


Destinies of Splendor

Destinies of Splendor PDF Author: Douglas Wuchina
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433106651
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Frieda Lawrence once remarked, «Nobody seems to have an idea of the quality of Lawrence's and my relationship, the essence of it.... The deep attraction was there and that was what counts.» This insightful and original study investigates how one of the finest literary minds of the twentieth century experienced deep sexual attraction. In close readings of all of D. H. Lawrence's major novels, Douglas Wuchina charts the growth of sexual attraction between Lawrencian couples as it affects both body and spirit. The theoretical framework is not Foucault's or Lacan's or Bakhtin's but Lawrence's own, with frequent reference to his innovative theory of the chakras and his rejection of modern partnership marriage in favor of «blood» attraction. Drawing on a variety of sources, psychological and sexological in addition to literary - this is one of the first studies to make extensive use of revealing drafts that have only recently become available in the Cambridge edition of Lawrence's works - Destinies of Splendor persuasively argues that the familiar strategies of Freudian pathologization and feminist denigration of Lawrence are not viable and that it is possible to reaffirm Lawrence's romantically sensitive vision of the sexual bond between man and woman.

Straight

Straight PDF Author: Hanne Blank
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 080704444X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
It's surprising that the term "heterosexuality" is less than 150 years old and that heterosexuality's history has never before been written, given how obsessed we are with it. In Straight, independent scholar Hanne Blank delves deep into the contemporary psyche as well as the historical record to chronicle the realm of heterosexual relations--a subject that is anything but straight and narrow. Consider how Catholic monasticism, the reading of novels, the abolition of slavery, leisure time, divorce, and constipation of the bowels have all at some time been labeled enemies of the heterosexual state. With an extensive historical scope and plenty of juicy details and examples, Straight provides a fascinating look at the vagaries, schisms, and contradictions of what has so often been perceived as an irreducible fact of nature.

Libidinal Currents

Libidinal Currents PDF Author: Joseph Allen Boone
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226064666
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
From Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner and Doris Lessing, modern fiction surges with libidinal currents. The most powerful of these fictions are not merely about sex; rather, they attempt to incorporate the workings of eros into their narrative forms. In doing so, Joseph Allen Boone argues, these modern fictions of sexuality create a politics and poetics of the perverse with the power to transform how we think about and read modernism. Challenging overarching theories of the novel by carefully mapping the historical contexts that have influenced modern experimental narratives, Boone constructs a model for interpreting sexuality that reaches from Freud's theory of the libidinal instincts to Foucault's theory of sexual discourse. The most ambitious study yet written on the links between literary modernity and the psychology of sex, Boone's Libidinal Currents will be a landmark book in the study of modernist fiction, gay studies/queer theory, feminist criticism, and studies in sexuality and gender.

The Opposite of Desire

The Opposite of Desire PDF Author: Tonya Krouse
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739123386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
"In The Opposite of Desire, Tonya Krouse argues that explicit depictions of sex and sexuality operate as central sites of modernist aesthetic experimentation. To explore the aesthetic repercussions of these scenes in the novels of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce, Krouse resists the common critical approach of reading such representations through theories of desire, obscenity, or pornography. Instead, she examines these depictions in terms of "the opposite of desire," or pleasure, and this approach allows Krouse to historicize these novelists' preoccupations with entering into discourses on sex and sexuality." "Examining explicit representations of sex and sexuality in modernist novels, Krouse asserts that these scenes provide a lens through which to examine modernist aesthetic interests as well as the centrality of issues surrounding sex, sexuality, and gender in the modernist period. Approaching scenes of sex and sexuality with the aid of Michel Foucault's theories about sexual discourses, The Opposite of Desire thoroughly examines modernist attempts to put pleasure into representation."--BOOK JACKET.

Cruising Modernism

Cruising Modernism PDF Author: Michael Trask
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717472
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Modern society, Michael Trask argues in this incisive and original book, chose to couch class difference in terms of illicit sexuality. Trask demonstrates how sexual science's concept of erotic perversion mediated the writing of both literary figures and social theorists when it came to the innovative and unsettling social arrangements of the early twentieth century. Trask focuses on the James brothers in a critique of pragmatism and anti-immigrant sentiment, shows the influence of behavioral psychology on Gertrude Stein's work, uncovers a sustained reflection on casual labor in Hart Crane's lyric poetry, and traces the identification of working-class Catholics with deviant passions in Willa Cather's fiction. Finally, Trask examines how literary leftists borrowed the antiprostitution rhetoric of Progressive-era reformers to protest the ascendance of consumerism in the 1920s.Viewing class as a restless and unstable category, Trask contends, American modernist writers appropriated sexology's concept of evasive, unmoored desire to account for the seismic shift in social relations during the Progressive era and beyond. Looking closely at the fraught ideological space between real and perceived class differences, Cruising Modernism discloses there a pervasive representation of sexuality as well.

Celibacies

Celibacies PDF Author: Benjamin Kahan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822377187
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
In this innovative study, Benjamin Kahan traces the elusive history of modern celibacy. Arguing that celibacy is a distinct sexuality with its own practices and pleasures, Kahan shows it to be much more than the renunciation of sex or a cover for homosexuality. Celibacies focuses on a diverse group of authors, social activists, and artists, spanning from the suffragettes to Henry James, and from the Harlem Renaissance's Father Divine to Andy Warhol. This array of figures reveals the many varieties of celibacy that have until now escaped scholars of literary modernism and sexuality. Ultimately, this book wrests the discussion of celibacy and sexual restraint away from social and religious conservatism, resituating celibacy within a history of political protest and artistic experimentation. Celibacies offers an entirely new perspective on this little-understood sexual identity and initiates a profound reconsideration of the nature and constitution of sexuality.

Gender and the Intersubjective Sublime in Faulkner, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf

Gender and the Intersubjective Sublime in Faulkner, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf PDF Author: Erin Speese
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317130383
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Exploring how the modern novel's complex depictions of parenthood restructure traditional conceptions of the Romantic sublime, Erin K. Johns Speese shows how William Faulkner, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf use related strategies to rewrite the traditional sublime as an intersubjective experience. Speese shows that this reframing depends on the recognition of social objectification and an ethics of reciprocal empathy between mothers and fathers. She juxtaposes traditional aesthetics and Slavoj Žižek’s concept of the sublime object of ideology with recent theoretical work regarding identity, arguing that these modern novelists construct what she terms a "sublime subject," that is, a person who functions in the space of the traditional sublime object. In revealing the possibility of transcendent emotional connection over reason, these novelists critique the objectification of the other in favor of a sublime experience that reveals the subject-shattering power of empathy.

From Ah Q to Lei Feng

From Ah Q to Lei Feng PDF Author: Wendy Larson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804769826
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
When Freudian sexual theory hit China in the early 20th century, it ran up against competing models of the mind from both Chinese tradition and the new revolutionary culture. Chinese theorists of the mind—both traditional intellectuals and revolutionary psychologists— steadily put forward the anti-Freud: a mind shaped not by deep interiority that must be excavated by professionals, but shaped instead by social and cultural interactions. Chinese novelists and film directors understood this focus and its relationship to Mao's revolutionary ethos, and much of the literature of twentieth-century China reflects the spiritual qualities of the revolutionary mind. From Ah Q to Lei Feng investigates the continual clash of these contrasting models of the mind provided by Freud and revolutionary Chinese culture, and explores how writers and filmmakers negotiated with the implications of each model. .