Synopses & Reviews
Sexual confessions on television talk shows. Gender and medical discourse in colonial India. River Phoenix in
My Own Private Idaho. White women in a German colony. Henry James' thwarted love. What do these seemingly diverse subjects have in common?
All address, in different ways, social and cultural attempts to contain eroticism by delineating the perimeters of genders. They scrutinize the political investments in the construction of gender in such disparate locations as contemporary Hollywood, Renaissance England, colonial India and Africa, and in modern and contemporary homosexual discourse communities and in Freud's sessions with Dora.
But whether the gendering of the subject follows the dictates of conservative politics or the radical agenda of a marginalized interest, the essays reveal the erotic overflowthe floodthat cannot be contained within any one gender identity. In examining how the erotic escapes containment, this work discloses problems inherent in the intersections of gender and desire.
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Synopsis
Even when there is no direct contact, artists and writers develop many comparable techniques for coping with problems specific to their time. In
Modernist Patterns, Murray Roston explores the relationships between modernist artists and writers and their responses to the immediate challenges of their time, to the implications of Freudian psychology, molecular theory, relativist theory, and the general weakening of religious faith.
By placing the literary works of such writers as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway within the context of the changes that occurred in the visual arts, Modernist Patterns expands our understanding of literature and identifies the cultural shifts that generated stylistic innovations within the visual arts.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 274-280) and index.
About the Author
Carol Siegel is Associate Professor of English at Washington State University, Vancouver and author of
Lawrence Among the Women: Wavering Boundaries in Women's Literary Traditions and
Male Masochism: Modern Revisions of the Story of Love.
Ann Kibbey is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder and founding editor of Genders. She teaches cultural studies and is the author of The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence.