Browsing by Subject "Masculinity in literature"
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Item The construction of male subjectivity by four contemporary Spanish women writers(2006) Cívico Lyons, Inmaculada Concepción; Higginbotham, VirginiaItem Defeated heroes: constructions of masculinity in Weimar Republic battlefield notes(2006) Freitag, Björn Werner; Arens, Katherine, 1953-Drawing on fifteen battlefield novels written in Weimar Germany between 1928 and 1930, this dissertation examines various models of masculinity construction in terms of their cultural and political significance. A pioneer work, Erich Maria Remarque’s bestseller, Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) (1928/1929), was a major provocation that unleashed a Culture War. The Dolchstoßlegende, designed to account for the defeat of the German army, had not convinced everyone, so war veterans waited for a better explanation, which Remarque and other leftist-bourgeois novelists provided. Remarque’s group also included Ludwig Renn’s Krieg (1927/28), Edlef Köppen’s Heeresbericht (1930), Ernst Johannsen’s Vier von der Infanterie (1930), Ernst Glaeser’s Jahrgang 1902 (1928), Georg von der Vring’s Soldat Suhren (completed 1923, published 1927), Karl Federn’s Hauptmann Latour (1929), and Arnold Zweig’s Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (1927). Extreme opposition in this Culture War came from the right-wing militarists, including Franz Schauwecker’s Aufbruch der Nation (1929), Werner Beumelburg’s Die Gruppe Bosemüller (1930), Joseph Magnus Wehner’s Sieben vor Verdun (1930), and Hans Zöberlein’s Der Glaube an Deutschland (1931), who all sought to validate the war experience through disproportionate magnification of the German warrior-man. Alternative literary models, including Adrienne Thomas’ Die Katrin wird Soldat (1930), one of the rare war novels by a female author, as well as Theodor Plivier’s Des Kaisers Kulis (1930), and Adam Scharrer’s Vaterlandslose Gesellen (1930), reveal the war in its senseless inhumanity affecting men and women alike, thus serving as rare counterpoints to the dominant masculinist constructions. What this dissertation contributes to existing research is a new interpretive approach about how a text may play into public discourse. The prevailing images of German masculinity that had guided generations of German males were destroyed in the trenches. For ten years thereafter, war literature offered very little that individual male readers could use to reconstruct a positive image of the German man as a social and political being. Since traditional perceptions of masculinity had been shattered, literature had to take up the same war and rework its memory to have a therapeutic effect and fill this gap.Item Masculinity and the Gothic(Texas Tech University, 1995-12) Hendershot, Cyndy KayThis study explores masculinity in a variety of Gothic texts spanning the 1790s to the I990s. I argue that the Gothic mode works to contaminate realism, i.e., ideological reality, by introducing an unassimilable force. Thus works such as The Monk, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dracula, and The Island of Doctor Moreau all introduce an unassimilable element—daemon, alien, vampire, and Beast People, respectively—which threatens ideological reality by exposing the limits of that reality. I use a Lacanian framework to articulate this unassimilable element as being similar to Lacan's formulation of the objet petit a. My project focuses on one particular Western ideological category, traditional masculinity, and the Gothic's treatment of that category. I focus on ways in which the Gothic reveals the tension between the historical experience of men and women and the myth of masculinity as whole and dominant, rather than concealing the fissures that threaten to expose the male subject as a subject like the female one, one lacking and incapable of ever achieving wholeness and mastery: the female subject position is the Symbolic condition all subjects from a Lacanian viewpoint. The first section of my study, "Masculinity and the Body," establishes crucial issues regarding masculinity, heterosexuality, and the body, and the representation of them in Gothic texts. In the first chapter of this section I discuss The Monk, Dracula, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the second chapter of this section I explore The Italian, Psycho, and Dressed to Kill. After establishing key issues of the Gothic and masculinity in the first section, which examines texts ranging from the late eighteenth century to the present, I focus my attention on a particular historical period, the nineteenth century, examining both nineteenth-century texts and twentieth-century representations of the nineteenth century. Part Two is entitled "Masculinity and Science." In the first chapter of this section I analyze Frankenstein, "The Birth-mark," and "Rappaccini's Daughter." In the second chapter I examine "Green Tea," The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde, and "Olalla." Section Three of my study explores masculinity and imperialism. The first chapter of this section focuses on The Is/and of Doctor Moreau, "The Speckled Band," and Heart of Darkness. The second chapter of this section examines Jane Eyre, "The Villa Désirée," and Wide Sargasso Sea. The concluding chapter of my dissertation focuses on The Piano and its attempt to (re)vision the Gothic and its exploration of masculinity for a late-twentieth-century audience.