Sublime Enjoyment

Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-0-521-58437-1
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 112, 194 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 440 g

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Foster, Dennis A.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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.