The Poetics Of Tenderness

Download or read book The Poetics of Tenderness written by Robert Cantwell and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-12-13 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poetics of Tendernessa literary-critical essay on love, grounded in the developmental theory of the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and shaped by recent work on the neurobiology and anthropology of love. Itmaintains that sexual love is not merely an artifact or “invention” of culture, but a vital manifestation of the culture-making power itself. Calling upon Andreus Capellanus, Plato, Schopenhauer, Freud, William James, Hardy, Dreiser and Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrence and Tom Stoppard, among others, the book’s aim is to turn the discussion of sexuality around--to substitute for ideas and figures of violence and predation which have dominated our sexual imaginary for more than four decades much older and more durable associations of sex and love with care, affection, beauty, memory, worthiness, and ideality. It argues for a resurrection of tenderness, and holds out the possibility that even where anything goes love may yet be a source of sweetness and light, that mutual respect, equity, justice and decency in the spheres of sex and love will more likely flow from compassion and sympathy than from anger, fear, suspicion, mistrust, resentment, and bitterness. Close readings of two widely read novels, Dickens’ Great Expectations and Nabokov’s Lolita, preside over the discussion, exploring these authors’ distinctively detailed and probing accounts of love’s unfolding in particular social, cultural, historical and psychological settings.Both novels proceed from deep within the authors’ interior life; both novels release love from its normally deep entanglements with intimacy and isolation, compatibility and incompatibility, social place and social possibility, inspiring in their narrators a prolonged introspective inquiry into an all-consuming preoccupation which ultimately restores them to the moral order.

Download or read book Painting, Poetry, and the Invention of Tenderness in the Early Roman Empire written by Hérica Valladares and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tenderness is not a notion commonly associated with the Romans, whose mythical origin was attributed to brutal rape. Yet, as Hérica Valladares argues in this ground-breaking study, in the second half of the first century BCE Roman poets, artists, and their audience became increasingly interested in describing, depicting, and visualizing the more sentimental aspects of amatory experience. During this period, we see two important and simultaneous developments: Latin love elegy crystallizes as a poetic genre, while a new style in Roman wall painting emerges. Valladares' book is the first to correlate these two phenomena properly, showing that they are deeply intertwined. Rather than postulating a direct correspondence between images and texts, she offers a series of mutually reinforcing readings of painting and poetry that ultimately locate the invention of a new romantic ideal within early imperial debates about domesticity and the role of citizens in Roman society.

Download or read book The Poetics of Reverie written by Gaston Bachelard and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 1971-06-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this, his last significant work, an admired French philosopher provides extraordinary meditations on the relations between the imagining consciousness and the world, positing the notion of reverie as its most dynamic point of reference. In his earlier book, The Poetics of Space, Bachelard considered several kinds of "praiseworthy space" conducive to the flow of poetic imagery. In Poetics of Reverie he considers the absolute origins of that imagery: language, sexuality, childhood, the Cartesian ego, and the universe. Approaching the psychology of wonder from the phenomenological viewpoint, Bachelard demonstrates the aurgentative potential of all that awareness. Thus he distinguishes what is merely a phenomenon of relaxation from the kind of reverie which "poetry puts on the right track, the track of expanding consciousness"

Download or read book The Poetry of Thom Gunn written by Stefania Michelucci and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thom Gunn served as a mouthpiece for his time, illustrating the social, cultural, and historical transformations that have characterized western civilization from World War II until today. Starting with theoretical premises drawn from philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, this work examines Thom Gunn's entire poetic career. In Gunn's early poetry, the author argues, the predominant theme is the desire for freedom from the painful prison of the intellect and from the masks that the individual feels compelled to wear even in his sexual relationships. In Gunn's later poetry, the author notes a gradual opening to human relationships and to Nature, which is also Gunn's vindication and reevaluation of his own nature and the liberation of his long repressed and hidden homosexuality.

Download or read book Beauty is a Verb written by Jennifer Bartlett and published by Cinco Puntos Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chosen by the American Library Association as a 2012 Notable Book in Poetry. Beauty is a Verb is a ground-breaking anthology of disability poetry, essays on disability, and writings on the poetics of both. Crip Poetry. Disability Poetry. Poems with Disabilities. This is where poetry and disability intersect, overlap, collide and make peace. " BEAUTY IS A VERB] is going to be one of the defining collections of the 21st century...the discourse between ability, identity & poetry will never be the same." --Ron Silliman, author of In The American Tree "This powerful anthology succeeds at intimately showing...disability through the lenses of poetry. What emerges from the book as a whole is a stunningly diverse array of conceptions of self and other."--Publishers Weekly, starred review From "Beauty and Variations" by Kenny Fries: How else can I quench this thirst? My lips travel down your spine, drink the smoothness of your skin. I am searching for the core: What is beautiful? Who decides? Can the laws of nature be defied? Your body tells me: come close. But beauty distances even as it draws me near. What does my body want from yours? My twisted legs around your neck. You bend me back. Even though you can't give the bones at birth I wasn't given, I let you deep inside. You give me--what? Peeling back my skin, you expose my missing bones. And my heart, long before you came, just as broken. I don't know who to blame. So each night, naked on the bed, my body doesn't want repair, but longs for innocence. If innocent, despite the flaws I wear, I am beautiful. Sheila Black is a poet and children's book writer. In 2012, Poet Laureate Philip Levine chose her as a recipient of the Witter Bynner Fellowship. Disability activist Jennifer Bartlett is a poet and critic with roots in the Language school. Michael Northen is a poet and the editor of Wordgathering: A Journal of Poetics and Disability.

Download or read book Tenderness written by Alison MacLeod and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Powerful, moving, brilliant . . . an utterly captivating read, and I came away from it with this astonished thought: There's nothing this writer can't do." --Elizabeth Gilbert For readers of A Gentleman in Moscow and Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, an ambitious, spellbinding historical novel about sensuality, censorship, and the novel that set off the sexual revolution. On the glittering shores of the Mediterranean in 1928, a dying author in exile races to complete his final novel. Lady Chatterley's Lover is a sexually bold love story, a searing indictment of class distinctions, and a study in sensuality. But the author, D.H. Lawrence, knows it will be censored. He publishes it privately, loses his copies to customs, and dies bereft. Booker Prize-longlisted author Alison MacLeod brilliantly recreates the novel's origins and boldly imagines its journey to freedom through the story of Jackie Kennedy, who was known to be an admirer. In MacLeod's telling, Jackie-in her last days before becoming first lady-learns that publishers are trying to bring D.H. Lawrence's long-censored novel to American and British readers in its full form. The U.S. government has responded by targeting the postal service for distributing obscene material. Enjoying what anonymity she has left, determined to honor a novel she loves, Jackie attends the hearing incognito. But there she is quickly recognized, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover takes note of her interest and her outrage. Through the story of Lawrence's writing of Lady Chatterley's Lover, the historic obscenity trial that sought to suppress it in the United Kingdom, and the men and women who fought for its worldwide publication, Alison MacLeod captures the epic sweep of the twentieth century from war and censorship to sensuality and freedom. Exquisite, evocative, and grounded in history, Tenderness is a testament to the transformative power of fiction.

Download or read book Freedom's Empire written by Laura Doyle and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-11 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pathbreaking work of scholarship, Laura Doyle reveals the central, formative role of race in the development of a transnational, English-language literature over three centuries. Identifying a recurring freedom plot organized around an Atlantic Ocean crossing, Doyle shows how this plot structures the texts of both African-Atlantic and Anglo-Atlantic writers and how it takes shape by way of submerged intertextual exchanges between the two traditions. For Anglo-Atlantic writers, Doyle locates the origins of this narrative in the seventeenth century. She argues that members of Parliament, religious refugees, and new Atlantic merchants together generated a racial rhetoric by which the English fashioned themselves as a “native,” “freedom-loving,” “Anglo-Saxon” people struggling against a tyrannical foreign king. Stories of a near ruinous yet triumphant Atlantic passage to freedom came to provide the narrative expression of this heroic Anglo-Saxon identity—in novels, memoirs, pamphlets, and national histories. At the same time, as Doyle traces through figures such as Friday in Robinson Crusoe, and through gothic and seduction narratives of ruin and captivity, these texts covertly register, distort, or appropriate the black Atlantic experience. African-Atlantic authors seize back the freedom plot, placing their agency at the origin of both their own and whites’ survival on the Atlantic. They also shrewdly expose the ways that their narratives have been “framed” by the Anglo-Atlantic tradition, even though their labor has provided the enabling condition for that tradition. Doyle brings together authors often separated by nation, race, and period, including Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Olaudah Equiano, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Wilson, Pauline Hopkins, George Eliot, and Nella Larsen. In so doing, she reassesses the strategies of early women novelists, reinterprets the significance of rape and incest in the novel, and measures the power of race in the modern English-language imagination.