“Shocked at my Levity”

Ezra Pound’s humor promotes unorthodox intimacies between readers and writers. His portraits in The Pisan Cantos catch Henry James and James Joyce laughing, emphasizing their human peculiarities and Pound’s personal knowledge of them. These scenes suggest how unsatisfactory he finds traditional notions of poetic immortality. Instead, his portraits of jesting writers make literary texts contain the artist as both heroic figure and human individual, doing the work of high art and personal interaction simultaneously. Pound loves the Romantic figure of the poet-hero, but his laughter emphasizes that artist’s fallible humanity, and highlights modernism’s concern with creating accurate models of imaginative sympathy. As Pound’s laughter becomes more intimate, however, it is also more troubling: humor in The Cantos seeks to enlist his reader not just in his poem but in his hierarchical vision of art and his fascist politics.

Archaeologies of Gossip: AIDS in Contemporary Gay Fiction

<p>Queer criticism is now in its third decade and, as critical orthodoxy, running up against its own limitations. What, for example, is a discipline preoccupied with the unspoken, the marginal and the blurring of gender boundaries to do with Edmund White’s unambiguously gay, masculine “red unsheathed fury of the third penis of the afternoon”? The Western AIDS novel is, overwhelmingly, a product of a historically precise, explicitly gay, male experience. This thesis seeks unapologetically to engage with this writing on its own terms, eschewing the queer critical lens as insufficient, and, rather, reading for a specifically gay aesthetic. Grounded in a broader overview of both AIDS novels and existing criticism, this thesis consists of extended close readings of two exemplary AIDS novels: Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Firstly, I articulate the centrality of the gay sexual body to the representation of AIDS in The Farewell Symphony, tracing its representation of the disease through the epidemiological mapping of the virus itself, within the highly specific culture of gay New York in the 1970s. Secondly, I examine the way in which the re-imagination of a selective tradition of gay literary predecessors in The Line of Beauty, specifically Henry James and Oscar Wilde, provides an aesthetic solution to articulating AIDS.</p>

Archaeologies of Gossip: AIDS in Contemporary Gay Fiction

<p>Queer criticism is now in its third decade and, as critical orthodoxy, running up against its own limitations. What, for example, is a discipline preoccupied with the unspoken, the marginal and the blurring of gender boundaries to do with Edmund White’s unambiguously gay, masculine “red unsheathed fury of the third penis of the afternoon”? The Western AIDS novel is, overwhelmingly, a product of a historically precise, explicitly gay, male experience. This thesis seeks unapologetically to engage with this writing on its own terms, eschewing the queer critical lens as insufficient, and, rather, reading for a specifically gay aesthetic. Grounded in a broader overview of both AIDS novels and existing criticism, this thesis consists of extended close readings of two exemplary AIDS novels: Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Firstly, I articulate the centrality of the gay sexual body to the representation of AIDS in The Farewell Symphony, tracing its representation of the disease through the epidemiological mapping of the virus itself, within the highly specific culture of gay New York in the 1970s. Secondly, I examine the way in which the re-imagination of a selective tradition of gay literary predecessors in The Line of Beauty, specifically Henry James and Oscar Wilde, provides an aesthetic solution to articulating AIDS.</p>

Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

This book examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for US literary realism. Advances in anesthesia in the final decades of the nineteenth century together with influential religious ideologies helped strengthen the equation of a comfortable existence insulated from physical suffering with the height of civilization. Theories of the civilizing process as intensifying sensitivity to suffering were often adduced to justify a revulsion from physical pain among the postbellum elite. Yet a sizeable portion of this elite rejected this comfort-seeking, pain-avoiding aesthetic as a regrettable consequence of over-civilization. Proponents of the strenuous cult instead identified pain and strife as essential ingredients of an invigorated life. The Ache of the Actual examines variants on a lesser known counter-sensibility integral to the writings of a number of influential literary realists. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt each delineated alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering rather than to either revulsion from or immersion in it. They resolved the binary contrast between pain-aversion on one side and pain-immersion on the other by endorsing an uncommon responsiveness to pain whose precise form depended on the ethical and aesthetic priorities of the writer in question. Focusing on these variations elucidates the similarities and differences within US literary realism while revealing areas of convergence and divergence between realism and other long-nineteenth-century literary modes, chief among them both sentimentalism and naturalism, that were similarly preoccupied with pain.

“The Taste of Life”

This chapter begins with a comparative analysis of pain’s importance to three prominent nineteenth-century literary modes: sentimentalism, naturalism, and realism. It then turns to the distinctive aesthetic and ethical priorities of the high realism practiced by William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. It concludes with an extended analysis of Howellsian realism as the first of several examples of the high realist aesthetic. From the outset of his career, Howells explored the idea that a more refined literary sensibility hinges on a subtle sensitivity to suffering of various kinds, emphasizing a view of the elevated individual as possessing a heightened ability not just to experience pain but to manage his or her own reactions to it in a sophisticated fashion. Even in his most socially engaged fiction, Howells evinces a preference for a troubled, ruminative, and restrained affective response to others’ suffering over reactions his works portray as rash, boorish, or at best ill-conceived.

A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF GENDER SUBJECTIVITY IN HENRY JAMES’ THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

Reassessment and interpretation of gender dynamics in the current social order has been prevalent theme within gender discourses. The yoke of subordination borne by women as readers, writers or fictional characters in the patriarchal pyramid occupies a central space across the whole spectrum of debates. This study utilizes a qualitative mode of inquiry which is centered on textual analysis. The present study evaluates the instances of gender subjectivity and patterns of subjugation within the textual arena invested with hegemonic ideologies as depicted in the novel The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. The paper employs feminist critical discourse analysis as a tool to analyze The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James in order to dissect the underlying ideologies present in the Victorian time period and investigates discourses of subjectivity. The findings of the study demonstrate that notwithstanding temporal advancements, gender power structures remain intact, and women continue to suffer under patriarchal power structures. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0874/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>