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.
Author(s): Susan Mooney
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 355
City: Cham
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
