The Making and Mirroring of Masculine Subjectivities: Gender, Affect, and Ethics in Modern World Narratives

The Making and Mirroring of Masculine Subjectivities: Gender, Affect, and Ethics in Modern World Narratives
ISBN-10
3030991466
ISBN-13
9783030991463
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
356
Language
English
Published
2022-09-10
Publisher
Springer Nature
Author
Susan Mooney

Description

This book shows how diverse, critical modern world narratives in prose fiction and film emphasize masculine subjectivities through affects and ethics. Highlighting diverse affects and mental states in subjective voices and modes, modern narratives reveal men as feeling, intersubjective beings, and not as detached masters of master narratives. Modern novels and films suggest that masculine subjectivities originate paradoxically from a combination of copying and negation, surplus and lack, sameness and alterity: among fathers and sons, siblings and others. In this comparative study of more than 30 diverse world narratives, Mooney deftly uses psychoanalytic thought, narrative theories of first- and third-person narrators, and Levinasian and feminist ethics of care, creativity, honor, and proximity. We gain a nuanced picture of diverse postpaternal postgentlemen emerging out of older character structures of the knight and gentleman.

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