front cover of Protecting the Spanish Woman
Protecting the Spanish Woman
Gender Identity and Empowerment in María de Zayas's Works
Xabier Granja Ibarreche
University of Nevada Press, 2023
An important contribution to the study of women writers.

María de Zayas is unique in the seventeenth century as the only Spanish woman to write a collection of exemplary novels whose quality is often compared to Miguel de Cervantes’ masterful works. Her two main collections of short stories, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and Desengaños amorosos, encompass a social critique based on literary fiction that exposes flaws in the idealized archetypes of masculine identity in early modern Spain. Zayas’s stories redefine women’s patriarchal disadvantage as a tool to expose the ways in which early modern Spanish women could be empowered to counteract men’s discursive and political authority, which they use to unfairly maintain their own social privilege.
 
Xabier Granja Ibarreche explores how Zayas defies Spanish hegemony by manipulating and transforming the ideals of courtly masculinity that had been popularized by conduct manuals and the traits they specified for appropriate noble comportment. In doing so, Zayas elaborates a nonofficial discourse throughout plots that subvert patriarchal hierarchies: she rearticulates the existing ideological order to empower women who are no longer willing to remain silent and oppressed by masculine domination after centuries of failing to attain a sufficiently self-sufficient political position to ascend in the social hierarchy. By inverting the male gaze that assumes masculinity as a preeminent identity, Zayas subverts the patriarchal subject/masculine, object/feminine order and destabilizes manly superiority as a basic universal reality, thereby empowering and unshackling Spanish women to liberate Iberian culture from the repressive and pernicious future she forebodes.
[more]

front cover of Proust among the Nations
Proust among the Nations
From Dreyfus to the Middle East
Jacqueline Rose
University of Chicago Press, 2011

 Known for her far-reaching examinations of psychoanalysis, literature, and politics, Jacqueline Rose has in recent years turned her attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of the most enduring and apparently intractable conflicts of our time. In Proust among the Nations, she takes the development of her thought on this crisis a stage further, revealing it as a distinctly Western problem.

In a radical rereading of the Dreyfus affair through the lens of Marcel Proust in dialogue with Freud, Rose offers a fresh and nuanced account of the rise of Jewish nationalism and the subsequent creation of Israel. Following Proust’s heirs, Beckett and Genet, and a host of Middle Eastern writers, artists, and filmmakers, Rose traces the shifting dynamic of memory and identity across the crucial and ongoing cultural links between Europe and Palestine. A powerful and elegant analysis of the responsibility of writing, Proust among the Nations makes the case for literature as a unique resource for understanding political struggle and gives us new ways to think creatively about the violence in the Middle East.
[more]

front cover of Proust in Perspective
Proust in Perspective
VISIONS AND REVISIONS
Edited by Armine Kotin Mortimer and Katherine Kolb
University of Illinois Press, 2002
Marcel Proust speaks to us today as a contemporary and a classic. His great novel resonates across languages and time, summing up the past, interpreting the present, and envisioning the future. For Proust in Perspective, scholars from France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Japan, Canada, and the United States have drawn on rich new editions of Proust's novel and correspondence to bring us fresh views of his work.
 
In nineteen original essays, a foreword by Jean–Yves Tadié, and an introduction by editors Armine Kotin Mortimer and Katherine Kolb, this volume guides readers through the dense weave of Proust's fiction and correspondence. The essays take us into the realm of Proustian language–-as quotation, metaphor, and memory–-and into art history and musical ideology, connecting the art of words with the words of art. They explore the interface of history and fiction, the mysteries of the text's evolution, and the dilemmas of its publication. They present the revelations of genetic criticism and the surprises of gender analysis.
 
Taken together, these essays conjure a multifaceted profile of Proust–-his work, life, character, and influence–-and of new directions in Proust scholarship today. With compelling rigor and infectious enthusiasm, Proust in Perspective conveys the magnitude of Proust's continuing appeal.
 
[more]

front cover of Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context, Second Edition
Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context, Second Edition
Gerald Gillespie
Catholic University of America Press, 2010
The original version of Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context strove to show how a kindred encyclopedic drive and sacramental sense informed their responses to the epochal trauma, yielding three distinct and monumental visions of the human estate by the 1920s.
[more]

front cover of Psycho-Sexual
Psycho-Sexual
Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin
By David Greven
University of Texas Press, 2013

Bridging landmark territory in film studies, Psycho-Sexual is the first book to apply Alfred Hitchcock’s legacy to three key directors of 1970s Hollywood—Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, and William Friedkin—whose work suggests the pornographic male gaze that emerged in Hitchcock’s depiction of the voyeuristic, homoerotically inclined American man. Combining queer theory with a psychoanalytic perspective, David Greven begins with a reconsideration of Psycho and the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much to introduce the filmmaker’s evolutionary development of American masculinity.

Psycho-Sexual probes De Palma’s early Vietnam War draft-dodger comedies as well as his film Dressed to Kill, along with Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Friedkin’s Cruising as reactions to and inventive elaborations upon Hitchcock’s gendered themes and aesthetic approaches. Greven demonstrates how the significant political achievement of these films arises from a deeply disturbing, violent, even sorrowful psychological and social context. Engaging with contemporary theories of pornography while establishing pornography’s emergence during the classical Hollywood era, Greven argues that New Hollywood filmmakers seized upon Hitchcock’s radical decentering of heterosexual male dominance. The resulting images of heterosexual male ambivalence allowed for an investment in same-sex desire; an aura of homophobia became informed by a fascination with the homoerotic. Psycho-Sexual also explores the broader gender crisis and disorganization that permeated the Cold War and New Hollywood eras, reimagining the defining premises of Hitchcock criticism.

[more]

front cover of The Public Mirror
The Public Mirror
Moliere and the Social Commerce of Depiction
Larry F. Norman
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Though much beloved and widely produced, Molière's satirical comedies pose a problem for those reading or staging his works today: how can a genre associated with biting caricature and castigation deliver engaging theater? Instead of simply dismissing social satire as a foundation for Molière's theater, as many have done, Larry F. Norman takes seriously Molière's claim that his satires are first and foremost effective theater.

Pairing close readings of Molière's comedies with insightful accounts of French social history and aesthetics, Norman shows how Molière conceived of satire as a "public mirror" provoking dynamic exchange and conflict with audience members obsessed with their own images. Drawing on these tensions, Molière portrays characters satirizing one another on stage, with their reactions providing dramatic conflict and propelling comic dialogue. By laying bare his society's system of imagining itself, Molière's satires both enthralled and enraged his original audience and provide us with a crucial key to the classical culture of representation.
[more]

front cover of Publishing the Family
Publishing the Family
June Howard
Duke University Press, 2001
In Publishing the Family June Howard turns a study of the collaborative novel The Whole Family into a lens through which to examine American literature and culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. Striving to do equal justice to historical particulars and the broad horizons of social change, Howard reconsiders such categories of analysis as authorship, genre, and periodization. In the process, she offers a new method for cultural studies and American studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Publishing the Family describes the sources and controversial outcome of a fascinating literary experiment. Howard embeds the story of The Whole Family in the story of Harper & Brothers’ powerful and pervasive presence in American cultural life, treating the publisher, in effect, as an author.
Each chapter of Publishing the Family casts light on some aspect of life in the United States at a moment that arguably marked the beginning of our own era. Howard revises common views of the turn-of-the-century literary marketplace and discusses the perceived crisis in the family as well as the popular and expert discourses that emerged to remedy it. She also demonstrates how creative women like Bazar editor Elizabeth Jordan blended their own ideas about the “New Woman” with traditional values. Howard places these analyses in the framework of far-reaching historical changes, such as the transformation of the public meaning of emotion and “sentimentality.” Taken together, the chapters in Publishing the Family show how profoundly the modern mapping of social life relies on boundaries between family and business, culture and commerce, which The Whole Family and Publishing the Family constantly unsettle.
Publishing the Family will interest students and scholars of American history, literature, and culture, as well as those studying gender, sexuality, and the family.
[more]

front cover of Puccini
Puccini
His International Art
Michele Girardi
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Puccini's operas are among the most popular and widely performed in the world, yet few books have examined his body of work from an analytical perspective. This volume remedies that lack in lively prose accessible to scholars and opera enthusiasts alike.
[more]

front cover of Pushkin and the Genres of Madness
Pushkin and the Genres of Madness
The Masterpieces of 1833
Gary Rosenshield
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

    In 1833 Alexander Pushkin began to explore the topic of madness, a subject little explored in Russian literature before his time. The works he produced on the theme are three of his greatest masterpieces: the prose novella The Queen of Spades, the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, and the lyric "God Grant That I Not Lose My Mind." Gary Rosenshield presents a new interpretation of Pushkin’s genius through an examination of his various representations of madness.
    Pushkin brilliantly explored both the destructive and creative sides of madness, a strange fusion of violence and insight. In this study, Rosenshield illustrates the surprising valorization of madness in The Queen of Spades and "God Grant That I Not Lose My Mind" and analyzes The Bronze Horseman’s confrontation with the legacy of Peter the Great, a cornerstone figure of Russian history. Drawing on themes of madness in western literature, Rosenshield situates Pushkin in a greater framework with such luminaries as Shakespeare, Sophocles, Cervantes, and Dostoevsky providing an insightful and absorbing study of Russia’s greatest writer.

[more]

front cover of The Pushkin Handbook
The Pushkin Handbook
Edited by David M. Bethea
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
The Pushkin Handbook, a collection of studies by leading Pushkin scholars from the former Soviet Union, North America, and elsewhere, unites in one volume a multiplicity of voices engaged in a genuinely post-Soviet dialogue. From its beginnings, Pushkin’s oeuvre has accommodated numerous, often competing readings. This book is further testimony to the continuing complexity of Russia’s preeminent writer: his place in the literary and cultural cosmos, his relationship to his Russian predecessors and contemporaries, and his reception and interpretation at various points in history.
[more]

front cover of Pynchon's California
Pynchon's California
Scott McClintock and John Miller
University of Iowa Press, 2014
Pynchon’s California is the first book to examine Thomas Pynchon’s use of California as a setting in his novels. Throughout his 50-year career, Pynchon has regularly returned to the Golden State in his fiction. With the publication in 2009 of his third novel set there, the significance of California in Pynchon’s evolving fictional project becomes increasingly worthy of study. Scott McClintock and John Miller have gathered essays from leading and up-and-coming Pynchon scholars who explore this topic from a variety of critical perspectives, reflecting the diversity and eclecticism of Pynchon’s fiction and of the state that has served as his recurring muse from The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) through Inherent Vice (2009).

Contributors explore such topics as the relationship of the “California novels” to Pynchon’s more historical and encyclopedic works; the significance of California's beaches, deserts, forests, freeways, and  “hieroglyphic” suburban sprawl; the California-inspired noir tradition; and the surprising connections to be uncovered between drug use and realism, melodrama and real estate, private detection and the sacred. The authors bring insights to bear from an array of critical, social, and historical discourses, offering new ways of looking not only at Pynchon’s California novels, but at his entire oeuvre. They explore both how the history, geography, and culture of California have informed Pynchon’s work and how Pynchon’s ever-skeptical critical eye has been turned on the state that has been, in many ways, the flagship for postmodern American culture.
 
CONTRIBUTORS: Hanjo Berressem, Christopher Coffman, Stephen Hock, Margaret Lynd, Scott MacLeod, Scott McClintock, Bill Millard, John Miller, Henry Veggian 
[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
PYNCHON'S POETICS
Interfacing Theory and Text
Hanjo Berressem
University of Illinois Press, 1993
Pynchon's Poetics
  is a provocative, intelligent analysis of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's
  Rainbow, and Vineland. Hanjo Berrssem examines these works in the
  light of post-structuralist thought and literary theory, investigating the notion
  of subjectivity and the relations between the subject, culture, and language.
 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter