The Making and Mirroring of Masculine Subjectivities

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.

Explores diverse male narratives and subjects beyond the homogenizing idea of toxic masculinity Spans the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and a truly global range of authors Draws on gendered theories of narrative, affect, and ethics to explore masculine relationships

Auteur
Susan Mooney, professor of Comparative Literature at the University of South Florida, USA, is author of The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality: Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth-Century Novel (2008).

Contenu
1 Introduction: Feeling MenEmotional Masculine Subjectivities, Ethics, and the Postpaternal.- Part I. Fathers and Sons: Mirroring, Lack, and Masculine Subjectivities.- 2 Narrative Ethics of Care: Folding Fathers, Gifts Given, Subjectivity beyond Mastery.- 3 Ethics of Creation: Copy of the Copy: Sons' Narratives of Feeling of Selfhood.- Part II. The Gentleman Deconstructed.- 4 Ethics of Honour: Post-Gentlemen's Narratives and Affects of Alterity.- 5 Ethics of Proximity: Lack and Dispossession.- 6 Conclusion: Masculinities of Feeling at Matrixial Borderspaces.