Sublime Enjoyment
On the Perverse Motive in American Literature
£90.00
Part of Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
- Author: Dennis A. Foster, Southern Methodist University, Texas
- Date Published: March 1998
- availability: Available
- format: Hardback
- isbn: 9780521584371
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Linking classic American literature to contemporary popular culture, Sublime Enjoyment argues that the rational systems of normal social life are motivated and sustained by 'perverse' desires. This perversity arises from the failure of symbolic satisfactions - love, work, success - to make us happy, and from our refusal to accept that failure. Hoping to achieve satisfaction, we respond ultimately to situations that evoke older, more primary drives and their attendant emotions. But while a conventional pervert knows exactly what to want, the healthy pervert must find enjoyment inadvertently: in the object of the sublime, in duty and reason, and in the obligations of a 'fun morality'. Examining the ways in which this inadvertence is represented in American literature and culture, Dennis Foster identifies ways in which longings are linked to social forces.
Read more- Links 'classic' American literature to contemporary popular culture
- Provides accessible literary applications of complex psychoanalytic principles
- Connects literary examples to larger social issues
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×Product details
- Date Published: March 1998
- format: Hardback
- isbn: 9780521584371
- length: 194 pages
- dimensions: 229 x 152 x 14 mm
- weight: 0.46kg
- availability: Available
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: the problem with pleasure
2. The sublime community
3. Re-Poe Man: Poe's un-American sublime
4. Too resurgent: liquidity and consumption in Henry James
5. Alphabetic pleasures: The Names
6. J. G. Ballard's empire of the senses: perversion and the failure of authority
7. Fatal West: W. S. Burrough's perverse destiny
8. Conclusion: agency in the perverse
Notes
Bibliography
Index.
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