Reading the Male Gaze in Literature and Culture

Reading the Male Gaze in Literature and Culture PDF Author: James D. Bloom
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319599453
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
This book examines the phenomenon of 'the male gaze', a concept which has spread beyond academia and become a staple of cultural conversations across disciplinary boundaries. Male gazing has typically been disparaged and even stigmatized as a reflection of misogyny and an instrument of objectification, often justifiably so. But as this book argues and illustrates, male gazing can also be understood as an illuminating, intellectually engaging, aesthetically compelling, and even politically progressive practice. This study recounts how the author’s own coming-of-an-age as a gazer became the basis for his long career teaching and writing about American fiction and poetry and poetry, canonical and contemporary, as well as about film, painting, TV, and rock-and-roll. It includes closely-reasoned analyses of work by James Baldwin, Rembrandt, Willa Cather, Philip Roth, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Bob Dylan, Robert Stone,Tim O’Brien, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Frank O’Hara, Italo Calvino, John Schlesinger as well such cultural phenomena as the British Invasion of the 1960s, the Judgment of Paris in Greek mythology, the technology of seeing (kaleidoscopes, microscopes, telescopes) and the concept of 'objectification' itself.

Reading the Male Gaze in Literature and Culture

Reading the Male Gaze in Literature and Culture PDF Author: James D. Bloom
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319599453
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the phenomenon of 'the male gaze', a concept which has spread beyond academia and become a staple of cultural conversations across disciplinary boundaries. Male gazing has typically been disparaged and even stigmatized as a reflection of misogyny and an instrument of objectification, often justifiably so. But as this book argues and illustrates, male gazing can also be understood as an illuminating, intellectually engaging, aesthetically compelling, and even politically progressive practice. This study recounts how the author’s own coming-of-an-age as a gazer became the basis for his long career teaching and writing about American fiction and poetry and poetry, canonical and contemporary, as well as about film, painting, TV, and rock-and-roll. It includes closely-reasoned analyses of work by James Baldwin, Rembrandt, Willa Cather, Philip Roth, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Bob Dylan, Robert Stone,Tim O’Brien, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Frank O’Hara, Italo Calvino, John Schlesinger as well such cultural phenomena as the British Invasion of the 1960s, the Judgment of Paris in Greek mythology, the technology of seeing (kaleidoscopes, microscopes, telescopes) and the concept of 'objectification' itself.

Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze

Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze PDF Author: Kathryn Hemmann
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030180956
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
The female gaze is used by writers and readers to examine narratives from a perspective that sees women as subjects instead of objects, and the application of a female gaze to male-dominated discourses can open new avenues of interpretation. This book explores how female manga artists have encouraged the female gaze within their work and how female readers have challenged the male gaze pervasive in many forms of popular media. Each of the chapters offers a close reading of influential manga and fancomics to illustrate the female gaze as a mode of resistant reading and creative empowerment. By employing a female gaze, professional and amateur creators are able to shape and interpret texts in a manner that emphasizes the role of female characters while challenging and reconfiguring gendered themes and issues.

The Doll Factory

The Doll Factory PDF Author: Elizabeth Macneal
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1982111933
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In this “sharp, scary, gorgeously evocative tale of love, art, and obsession” (Paula Hawkins, bestselling author of The Girl on the Train), a beautiful young woman aspires to be an artist, while a man’s dark obsession may destroy her world forever. The Doll Factory is a sweeping tale of curiosity, love, and possession set among all the sordidness and soaring ambition of 1850s London. The greatest spectacle London has ever seen is being erected in Hyde Park and, among the crowd watching, two people meet. For Iris, an aspiring artist of unique beauty, it is the encounter of a moment—forgotten seconds later—but for Silas, a curiosity collector enchanted by the strange and beautiful, the meeting marks a new beginning. When Iris is asked to model for Pre-Raphaelite artist Louis Frost, she agrees on the condition that he will also teach her to paint, and suddenly her world expands beyond anything she ever dreamed of. But she has no idea that evil stalks her. Silas, it seems, has thought of only one thing since that chance meeting, and his obsession is darkening by the day...

The Robber Bride

The Robber Bride PDF Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 030779797X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 550

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Book Description
From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—one of Margaret Atwood’s most unforgettable characters lurks at the center of this intricate novel like a spider in a web. The glamorous, irresistible, unscrupulous Zenia is nothing less than a fairy-tale villain in the memories of her former friends. Roz, Charis, and Tony—university classmates decades ago—were reunited at Zenia’s funeral and have met monthly for lunch ever since, obsessively retracing the destructive swath she once cut through their lives. A brilliantly inventive fabulist, Zenia had a talent for exploiting her friends’ weaknesses, wielding intimacy as a weapon and cheating them of money, time, sympathy, and men. But one day, five years after her funeral, they are shocked to catch sight of Zenia: even her death appears to have been yet another fiction. As the three women plot to confront their larger-than-life nemesis, Atwood proves herself a gleefully acute observer of the treacherous shoals of friendship, trust, desire, and power.

The Inward Gaze

The Inward Gaze PDF Author: Peter Middleton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415073271
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description


Women and Other Monsters

Women and Other Monsters PDF Author: Jess Zimmerman
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807054933
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
A fresh cultural analysis of female monsters from Greek mythology, and an invitation for all women to reclaim these stories as inspiration for a more wild, more “monstrous” version of feminism The folklore that has shaped our dominant culture teems with frightening female creatures. In our language, in our stories (many written by men), we underline the idea that women who step out of bounds—who are angry or greedy or ambitious, who are overtly sexual or not sexy enough—aren’t just outside the norm. They’re unnatural. Monstrous. But maybe, the traits we’ve been told make us dangerous and undesirable are actually our greatest strengths. Through fresh analysis of 11 female monsters, including Medusa, the Harpies, the Furies, and the Sphinx, Jess Zimmerman takes us on an illuminating feminist journey through mythology. She guides women (and others) to reexamine their relationships with traits like hunger, anger, ugliness, and ambition, teaching readers to embrace a new image of the female hero: one that looks a lot like a monster, with the agency and power to match. Often, women try to avoid the feeling of monstrousness, of being grotesquely alien, by tamping down those qualities that we’re told fall outside the bounds of natural femininity. But monsters also get to do what other female characters—damsels, love interests, and even most heroines—do not. Monsters get to be complete, unrestrained, and larger than life. Today, women are becoming increasingly aware of the ways rules and socially constructed expectations have diminished us. After seeing where compliance gets us—harassed, shut out, and ruled by predators—women have never been more ready to become repellent, fearsome, and ravenous.

Space, Gender, and the Gaze in Literature and Art

Space, Gender, and the Gaze in Literature and Art PDF Author: Ágnes Zsófia Kovács
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443867489
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This volume explores how the concepts of space and gaze are tied in with social constructions of gender relations. It discusses the gendered body, the queer gaze, the relationship between body and memory, the memory of war, monstrosity, and also domestic and hybrid spaces as key concepts. The arguments within the book connect core theoretical issues of gender and space to well-known literary texts and contexts, like the poems of Sylvia Plath and the novels of Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison and Cormack McCarthy. The collection will be of interest to university students and instructors alike, as an extended introduction to critical and theoretical discourses on gender and space.

Feminist Theory and Pop Culture

Feminist Theory and Pop Culture PDF Author: Adrienne Trier-Bieniek
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9463000615
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
Feminist Theory and Pop Culture synthesizes feminist theory with modern portrayals of gender in media culture. This comprehensive and interdisciplinary text includes an introductory chapter written by the editor as well as nine contributor chapters of original content. Included in the text: • Historical illustration of feminist theory • Application of feminist research methods for the study of gender • Feminist theoretical perspectives such as the male gaze, feminist standpoint theory, Black feminist thought, queer theory, masculinity theory, theories of feminist activism and postfeminism • Contributor chapters cover a range of topics from Western perspectives on Belly Dance classes to television shows such as GIRLS, Scandal and Orange is the New Black, as well as chapters which discuss gendered media forms like “chick lit”, comic books and Western perspectives of non-Western culture in film • Feminist theory as represented in the different waves of feminism, including a discussion of a fourth wave • Pedagogical features • Suggestions for further reading on topics covered • Discussion questions for classroom use Feminist Theory and Pop Culture was designed for classroom use and has been written with an eye toward engaging students in discussion. The book’s polished perspective on feminist theory juxtaposes popular culture with theoretical perspectives which have served as a foundation for the study of gender. This interdisciplinary text can serve as a primary or supplemental reading in undergraduate or graduate courses which focus on gender, pop culture, feminist theory or media studies. “This excellent anthology grounds feminism as articulated through four waves and features feminists responding to pop culture, while recognizing that popular culture has responded in complicated ways to feminisms. Contributors proffer lucid and engaging critiques of topics ranging from belly dancing through Fifty Shades of Grey, Scandal and Orange is the New Black. This book is a good read as well as an excellent text to enliven and inform in the classroom.” Dr. Jane Caputi Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Communication & Multimedia at Florida Atlantic University “Feminist Theory and Pop Culture is destined to be as popular as the culture it critiques. The text plays up the paradoxes of contemporary feminism and requires its readers to ask difficult questions about how and why the popular bring us pleasure. It is a contemporary collection that captures this moment in feminist time with diverse analyses of women’s representations across an impressive swath of popular culture. Feminist Theory and Pop Culture is the kind of text that makes me want to redesign my pop culture course. Again.” Dr. Ebony A. Utley, Assistant Professor of Communication at California State University-Long Beach, author of Rap and Religion Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, Ph.D. is a professor of sociology at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. She is the author of Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman: Female Fans and the Music of Tori Amos (Scarecrow 2013) and the co-editor of Gender & Pop Culture: A Text-Reader (Sense 2014). www.adriennetrier-bieniek.com

When She Was Good

When She Was Good PDF Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307788601
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral comes a funny, chilling novel set in a small town in the 1940s Midwest, featuring a young woman whose moral goodness may destroy her. "High, careful tragedy, nasty as life, and Roth emerges ... as a Dreiser who can write!" —Stanley Elkin When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning, and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.

Couples

Couples PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645721
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
“Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”—Time One of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a book that, when it debuted, scandalized the public with prose pictures of the way people live, and that today provides an engrossing epitaph to the short, happy life of the “post-Pill paradise.” It chronicles the interactions of ten young married couples in a seaside New England community who make a cult of sex and of themselves. The group of acquaintances form a magical circle, complete with ritualistic games, religious substitutions, a priest (Freddy Thorne), and a scapegoat (Piet Hanema). As with most American utopias, this one’s existence is brief and unsustainable, but the “imaginative quest” that inspires its creation is eternal. Praise for Couples “Couples [is] John Updike’s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust.”—The New York Times Book Review “Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don’t see how sex can be written about at all.”—Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review