Full 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.
Contents
1 Introduction: Feeling Men—Emotional 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.
