Sublime Surrender : Male Masochism at the Fin-de-siècle / Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne, Author.

Series:

Cornell studies in the history of psychiatry.

Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sex in opera.

Masochism in literature.

Sexual dominance and submission.

Masochism.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 224 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

When Heinrich Heine left his sick bed in 1848 and stumbled to the Louvre to fall before a statue of the goddess of beauty and lie in the pitying, cold glance she seemed to cast on his prostrate body, he defined a recurring motif of the second half of the nineteenth century, according to Suzanne R. Stewart. Directing her attention to the voice of the shriveled male body at beauty's feet, she investigates the discourse by and about men that took hold in the German-speaking world between 1870 and 1940 and that articulated masculinity as and through its own marginalization. Male masochism, she suggests, was a rhetorical strategy through which men asserted their cultural and political authority paradoxically by embracing the notion that they were (and always had been) wounded and suffering. Stewart demonstrates and develops her contentions through close readings of the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Richard Wagner, and Sigmund Freud, in each case showing that the very act through which men sacrificed themselves to women comprised the essence of the new male subject "deeply penetrated by relations of political and sexual power." Masochistic scenarios, whether in literature, music, the visual arts, or medicalized diagnoses of the fin-de-siècle malaise, stage the male as one who submits, as Stewart explains, "to an aestheticized and eroticized gaze and voice."

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. "A familiar smile of fascination": Masochism, Sublimation, and the Cruelty of Love

2. When Men Can No Longer Paint: Acts of Seeing in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs

3. The Theft of the Operatic Voice: Masochistic Seduction in Wagner's Parsifal

4. Saving Love: Is Sigmund Freud's Leader a Man?

5. The Rhetoric of Powerlessness

Notes

Selected Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Various drafts of chapters were read by members of the German Studies Reading Group and by participants in the German Studies Colloquium.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 195-220) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 21. Dez 2019)

ISBN:

1-5017-1774-X

OCLC:

1080549797