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

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. 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) Preface Acknowledgments Contents List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction: Feeling Men—Emotional Masculine Subjectivities, Ethics, and the Postpaternal Gendered Narratives of Emotions and Ethics: The Postpaternal “Structure of Feeling”: Gendered Narratives of Emotions and Ethics A Feminist Ethics for Masculinities Masculinities: Becoming Men, Yet How? Gendered Ethics and Gentlemanly Ambivalence Masculine Narrative Ethics Narrative Connections of Affects and Ethics Chapter Overview Bibliography Part I: Fathers and Sons: Mirroring, Lack, and Masculine Subjectivities Chapter 2: Narrative Ethics of Care: Folding Fathers, Gifts Given, Subjectivity Beyond Mastery Introduction Fathers as Mirrors: Look of Love, Lack, and Contesting the Fantasy of the Self-made Man Fathers Foregrounded: Paternal Subjectivities Subjectivity of the Father and His Non-image: White Noise and The Road Comparison of Subjective Fathers: Image and Non-image The Non-subjective Father Narrative Non-subjective Fathers Serving as Images for Sons Non-subjectivity Plus Non-image of the Father Comparison of Non-subjective Fathers: Death or Relinquishing Patriarchy Lacking Fathers: Looks of Love Bibliography Chapter 3: Ethics of Creation: Copy of the Copy: Sons’ Narratives of Feeling of Selfhood Introduction: Sons: Anxiety, Copies of Lack, and Self-reflection Beyond the Mirror Stage: Desire for the Father as Mirror, Protection, Love, Competition Same Copy: New Narratives of the Sons: Desiring Reflection Filial Difference: Rejection of the Copy: Narratives of Paternal and Maternal Death and Birth of the Son No Copy, No Death: Alternative Mirrors Filial Narratives of Ambivalence Bibliography Part II: The Gentleman Deconstructed Chapter 4: Ethics of Honor: Postgentlemen’s Narratives and Affects of Alterity Introduction The Gentleman, the Nomadic, Anxiety, and Other Affects The Gentleman: Historical Emergence and Narrative Permutations Shell of Heroism: Narratives of Emotion Irish Gentlemen: (Post)Colonial Masculinity Spanish Gamblers: Caballeros in Spain’s Silver Age, Civil War, and Postwar Era Russian Transnational Nomad African American Fighter: Beyond the Self-made Man The Transman and the Nomadic: Into the Mirror Beyond Protest Masculinity Bibliography Chapter 5: Ethics of Proximity: Lack and Dispossession Introduction Closeness in Subjectivities: Men’s Dominance, Abuse of Power, Delayed Empathy or Non-empathy Rewriting Marriage and Adultery Plots: Narrative Displacements Cinematic Proximity: Reordering Looking Relations and the Male Gaze The Look of Lack: Brokeback Mountain and the Castrating Patriarchal Gaze Transmasculine Subjectivity and the Unknowing Male Gaze: Boys Don’t Cry Lacking Looks: Y tu mamá también and the Male Object of Desire Almodóvar’s Touching Gaze of Masculinity: Abrazos rotos Double Lacks and Unknowing Subjectivity: Moonlight Temporal Mirages of Masculine Closeness and Otherness: Spanish Men and Boys of the Past, French Men of the Present and Dystopian World Future: Perturbatory Narratives by Juan Marsé and Michel Houellebecq Bibliography Chapter 6: Conclusion: Masculinities of Feeling at Matrixial Borderspaces Bibliography Index "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."--Page 4 of cover