Taking the Woman's Part: Engendering Roman Love Elegy

Ramus ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 110-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Wyke
Keyword(s):  
Double Barrier ◽  
Love Elegy ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Active Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Passive Object ◽  
Erotic Desire

When a woman writes herself into the genre of Roman love elegy she appears to break the recognised conventions for its production, according to which woman is the passive object of erotic desire not its active subject, the written not the writer. In discussing the elegiac poetry composed by Sulpicia, one means by which critics have expressed her extraordinary achievement has been to engender Roman love elegy. For Nick Lowe, Sulpicia's unique intervention was to compose poetry on the subject of her own erotic experience in ‘an obstinately male genre’. For Amy Richlin, Sulpicia breached a double barrier, both the ‘male job’ of writing and the ‘male genre’ of elegy. With reference to Sulpicia, I also labelled Augustan elegy as ‘male-oriented verse’ that constructs a ‘male narrative perspective’. While it is evidently the case that, with the notable exception of Sulpicia, the biological sex of all the authors of Roman elegy is male, I would now argue that the genre of elegy itself is not unequivocally ‘masculine’ and that to engender elegy unproblematically as ‘male’ fails to do justice to the genre's crucial play with Roman categories of gender.

scholarly journals Bartleby as Subject

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 175-190
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Relational Ontology ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Active Subject ◽  
Hardt And Negri ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Antonio Negri ◽  
Passive Object ◽  
Contrary Direction

Interpreting Bartleby the scrivener’s formula, “I would prefer not to,” in Herman Melville’s short story is a challenge for many philosophers, and Bartleby’s inaction also hints at a political position. The problem is how to explain this (in)action. It is unclear whether the scrivener is an active subject or a passive object. One potential solution would be to reduce Bartleby’s duality to one of its modes. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri claim the scrivener is a revolutionary subject; the uncertainty of his actions is regarded as a refusal. Hardt and Negri link this refusal with the next stage in the production of a new society and a new subject. Slavoj Žižek is also ambivalent about “Bartleby politics”. Although the Slovenian philosopher criticizes the authors of Empire, he still declares Bartleby a parallax figure combining action and inaction. However, Žižek did not stake out a position on the ontological status of the scrivener: is he a cunning subject and escape artist, or is he a distinction-basis of the system itself? In the contrary direction, Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben propose a program for the desubjectification of the scrivener from Wall Street. Here Bartleby is not a subject, but a figure of the ontology of a transcendental source which exists before all ontic differences. The essay offers a radically different solution to the Bartleby problem. It rejects the dichotomy between the subject and object and moves toward the object-oriented theory of action and relational ontology as presented in the works of Bruno Latour. In this ontology, any actors (human or non-human) may turn out situationally to be active or inactive, depending on their position in relation to other actors.

scholarly journals RE-READING MUSTANG IN THE CONTEXT OF THE IDEOLOGICAL COMPONENTS OF NARRATIVE

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 617-634
Author(s):  
Nermin ORTA
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Patriarchal Ideology ◽  
Active Subject ◽  
Stage Order ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Passive Object

Representation of the female body has been one of the most emphasized issues in gender debates. To refrain from reproducing the patriarchal ideology, it is important to be careful with the distinction between the body being tabooed and covered or transformed into an object of consumption under the name of freedom. The sexualization and objectification of the female body has taken place in the historical process. In many products from works of art to mass media, the woman, who is a passive object in front of the man who is the active/subject, is presented to the consumption of the male gaze. In almost every branch of art, from photography to cinema, the female body has been the object of the gaze and has been turned into an object of desire by being removed from the subject identity. Even in films that are claimed to be made with a woman's point of view and against gender discourses, the female body is sometimes objectified with elements such as the stage order, lighting, and perspective preferences. In this study, which aims to reveal how cinematographic elements can change the world of meaning, the first film of Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Mustang (2015), was discussed with feminist criticism in the axis of object-body by giving examples from various art branches in terms of cinematographic preferences. As a result of the study, it has been determined that the film, which claims to have set out with critical point of view, reproduces the discourses it tries to criticize. The reason for this is that the film falls into the traps of patriarchal ideology.

Light and Sensitivity: Love in the Time of the Daguerreotype

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Czeczot
Keyword(s):  
Male Gaze ◽  
History Of Photography ◽  
Sensitive Material ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Passive Object

The article deals with the love of Zygmunt Krasiński to Delfina Potocka. The point of departure is the poet's definition of love as looking and reads Krasiński's relationship with his beloved in the context of two phenomena that fascinated him at the time: daguerreotype and magnetism. The invention of the daguerreotype in which the history of photography and spiritism comes together becomes a pretext for the formulation of a new concept of love and the loving subject. In the era of painting the woman was treated as a passive object of the male gaze; photography reverses this scheme of power. Love ceases to be a static relationship of the subject in love and the passive object – the beloved. The philosophy of developing photographs (and invoking phantoms) allows Krasiński - the writing subject to become like a light-sensitive material that reveals the image of the beloved.

Subjectivity and Subjectivation

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
Angela Davis ◽  
Socialist Feminism ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Foucauldian Theory ◽  
Theoretical Paradigms

A chapter addressing the formation of the subject, and the rejection of the assumption that gender and sex are simply given, in various feminist theory paradigms. The project of advancing gender justice requires close attention to the ways in which categories of biological sex and gender, in intersectional relations with race, ethnicity, nationality, class and so on, are historically constructed and deployed to bring subjects into being, even as these same categories are resisted and re-negotiated at the same time in an always agonistic field of social relations. Special reference is made to three pairs of theoretical paradigms and practitioners: liberal feminism and Nancy J. Hirschmann; antiracist socialist feminism and Angela Davis; Derridean-Foucauldian theory and Judith Butler.

Strategic Self-Centering and the Female Narrator: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese

1989 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 75-91
Author(s):  
Sarah Paul
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Idealized Model ◽  
Radical Nature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Active Subject ◽  
Female Voices ◽  
Sonnets From The Portuguese ◽  
Passive Object

As the first love sonnet sequence written by a woman in English, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese challenged the conventions of amatory poetry when it was published in 1850. The genre, which had always required its female inhabitants to maintain an aloof and icy silence, was not accustomed to female voices. Certainly a speaker like the narrator of Barrett Browning's sonnets, loudly proclaiming her right to adopt postures of adoration and unworthiness toward a male love object, had never before disturbed its rarefied spaces. The radical nature of the work, however, seems to have been lost on its nineteenth-century audience. Victorian readers saw nothing shocking or immodest about the sonnets and actually admired them a great deal, particularly because they seemed, oddly enough, to uphold an idealized model of devout and reticent femininity. Hall Caine called them “essentially feminine in their hyper-refinement, in their intense tremulous spirituality” (310–11), while Eric Robertson wrote that “no woman's heart indeed was ever laid barer to us, but no heart could have laid itself bare more purely” (281). Twelve years later Edmund Gosse spoke of the cycle's “noble dignity,” “stainless harmony,” and “high ethical level of distinguished utterance” (11, 21). Neither these nor any other nineteenth- or early twentieth-century critic saw anything revolutionary in the sequence. Only in the past dozen years have feminist critics re-evaluating Sonnets from the Portuguese discovered within its self-deprecating stanzas an “enterprise of heroinism” asserting a woman's “right” to be the active subject of both poetry and feeling rather than their passive object.

scholarly journals Der Scheitel der Welt. Aline Valangin und das Onsernonetal

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 77-89
Author(s):  
Monika Mańczyk-Krygiel
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Immigration Policy ◽  
World War ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Elias Canetti ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Politically Persecuted

These considerations are devoted to literary pictures of the Onsernone Valley located on the Italian-Swiss border. It was here in the 1930s and 1940s that the Swiss writer Aline Valangin (1889– 1986) created an extraordinary oasis of freedom and peace in her estate in Comologno. She hosted famous figures such as Kurt Tucholsky, Elias Canetti, Ignazio Silone, or Wladimir Vogel, and provided shelter to many politically persecuted artists. The subject of detailed reflection is the question of the perception, experience and acquisition of the Ticino mountains both in works by Valangin and in biographical works about her; with a particular focus on narrative perspective — from the outside and the inside. Eveline Hasler in biographical novel Aline und die Erfindung der Liebe (2000) attempts to (re)construct an image of the Onsernone Valley as a specific “valley of poets”, presenting a subtle analysis of the interaction between the conservative inhabitants of the valley, attached to tradition, and the extravagant artists who found asylum and inspiration in the Ticino Alps. This novel is an example of a modern biography, which is characterized by narrative polyphony; the description of space becomes an important carrier of meanings and collective memory in the author’s concept. Aline Valangin sketches in her novels (Die Bargada, 1943 / Dorf an der Grenze, 1982) and short stories (Tessiner Erzählungen, 2018) an image of Onserone indigenous people’s everyday life in the thirties and forties, full of worries. Her stories include outsiders, misfits, social outcasts, guerrillas, smugglers, and exiles — and they all find haven in the Valley. Valangin’s works are also an important voice in the discussion of the essence of Swiss patriotism not only through strong criticism of Swiss immigration policy during World War II, but also by reflecting on the concept of the border as a place that unexpectedly proves to be a challenge and a particular kind of self-experience in the face of events that are tearing up the current existence.

scholarly journals Reconsidering Desire: The Multi-Disciplinary Imperative

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 317
Author(s):  
James Earl
Keyword(s):  
Specific Treatment ◽  
Tripartite Model ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
Academic Philosopher ◽  
Erotic Desire

In this paper, I will argue that the subject of human desire, and specifically erotic desire, can best be explored with a multi-disciplinary approach in the Humanities, from the standpoints of philosophy and psychotherapy, among others. Using desire as the example, I will then propose a model of cross disciplinary understanding of subjects, which might be used in many other areas of human concern. The tripartite model I propose, including elements of psychology, politics and philosophy, will, I hope, be of use to both theorists and practitioners in various fields. I also intend that the specific treatment here of erotic desire, using this model, will be of immediate interest to both philosophers and psychotherapists. The motivation behind this paper is a keen enthusiasm for what might be characterized as a European Continental, as opposed to Anglo-American, tradition of ‘blurring the disciplinary boundaries’– in particular between philosophy and psychotherapy. I am an academic philosopher, and a practicing psychotherapist.

scholarly journals MORPHOLOGICAL CORRELATION OPTIONS AND BIOLOGICAL GENDER IN OWN NAMES OF PERSONS

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-225
Author(s):  
E.A. Novikova
Keyword(s):  
Main Part ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Personal Names ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Colloquial Speech ◽  
Derivatives Of ◽  
Morphological Correlation

The article discusses the options for correlation of the morphological genus of personal names of individuals and biological sex. The subject of the review is the full proper names of the persons, as well as their formal word-formation modifications used in colloquial speech. The aim of the study is to identify types of correlation of the morphological genus and biological sex of personal names of individuals, as well as their derivative derivatives. As a result of the analysis, the following features were identified: in the main part of both male and female proper names, the morphological gender is consistently correlated with the biological sex, however, the vast majority of modification derivatives (the so-called “diminutive”) male names lose this type of correlation : there is a substitution of the formal indicators of the male morphological gender for the female. Similar “diminutive” lexical-semantic derivatives of female personal names, as a rule, also lose the consistent ratio of gender and gender.

scholarly journals Las Transformaciones De La Idea De Experiencia Femenina En Gloria Anzaldúa

Xihmai ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (23) ◽  
Author(s):  
Selen Catalina Arango Rodrí­guez [1]
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Gloria Anzaldua ◽  
Latin American Studies ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
Feminist Literary Criticism ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Las Mujeres

Resumen: La obra de Gloria Anzaldúa, en la actualidad, tiene una gran importancia para los estudios latinoamericanos y para la crí­tica literaria feminista. Esto se debe a la influencia de los estudios acerca de la interseccionalidad en el feminismo con las coordenadas de sexo, género, raza y clase social, y de los cambios en la crí­tica literaria interesada en estudiar la creación literaria en clave de polí­ticas de la escritura. También porque a partir de los 80 se hizo más visible la producción literaria de las mujeres y surgió un marcado interés en el estudio del sujeto del feminismo. Los anteriores hitos llevaron a las feministas a preguntarse por el sujeto del feminismo, y con él por la experiencia de este sujeto. Se encontró que la experiencia es una construcción como el género de los sujetos y que, por lo tanto, no puede adjudicarse un tipo de experiencia en razón al sexo biológico, la raza y la clase social. Este artí­culo, a partir de la obra de Gloria Anzaldúa, describe las transformaciones de la idea de experiencia en el feminismo y la aborda como una construcción e interpretación de sí­ mediante polí­ticas de la escritura.Palabras claves: Gloria Anzaldúa, experiencia, sujeto del feminismo, polí­ticas de la escritura, Crí­tica literaria feminista.Sumary: The work of Gloria Anzaldúa is currently of great importance for Latin American studies and for feminist literary criticism. This is due to the influence of intersectionality studies in feminism with the coordinates of sex, gender, race and social class, and of changes in literary criticism interested in studying literary creation in the key of writing policies. Also because from the 80's the women's literary production became more visible and there was a marked interest in the study of the subject of feminism. The previous milestones led feminists to wonder about the subject of feminism and the experience of this subject. It was found that experience is a construction as the gender of subjects and therefore can not be awarded a type of experience on the grounds of biological sex, race and social class. This article, based on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, describes the transformations of the idea of experience in feminism and approaches it as a construction and interpretation of itself through policies of writing.Key notes: Experience, Subject of feminism, Writing policies, Gloria Anzaldúa[1] Doctora en Pedagogí­a de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Docente e integrante del Grupo de Investigación FORMAPH de la Facultad de Educación y coordinadora de la Maestrí­a en Educación de Profundización de la Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia.

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