Throw Yourself Away : Writing and Masochism.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jarcho, Julia.

Series:

Thinking Literature Series

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (323 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Summary:

Proposes that we can best understand literature’s relationship to sex through a renewed focus on masochism. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, critic and playwright Julia Jarcho argues that these works conceive writing itself as masochistic, and masochism as sexuality enacted in writing. Throw Yourself Away is distinctive in its sustained focus on masochism as an engine of literary production across multiple authors and genres. In particular, Jarcho shows that theater has played a central role in modern erotic fantasies of the literary. Jarcho foregrounds writing as a project of distressed subjects: When masochistic writing is examined as a strategy of response to injurious social systems, it yields a surprisingly feminized—and less uniformly white—image of both masochism and authorship. Ultimately, Jarcho argues that a retheorized concept of masochism helps us understand literature itself as a sex act and shows us how writing can tend to our burdened, desirous bodies. With startling insights into such writers as Henry James, Henrik Ibsen, Mary Gaitskill, and Adrienne Kennedy, Throw Yourself Away furnishes a new masochistic theory of literature itself.

Contents:

Introduction: Another book about masochism

"You're not a masochist": sadism, realism, and fantasy in Gaitskill, Deleuze, and Freud

Cruel theater: Hedda Gabler and "Nona Vincent"

"Caught fire in my mind": Adrienne Kennedy's intimacies of negation

"With both hands": autotheory's masochistic theater

Pure love

Curtains.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226835044

0226835049

OCLC:

1443456711