LITERARY CRITICISM:

Love, Desire and Class General Introduction

2007 Fall

Outline

A prelude “Love Story” General Questions What is Romantic Love and what’s

wrong with it? Course Outline at a glance; Section I Three Traditional Love Poems & one

Contemporary Song Reference Readings for next week

Love Story By Andy Williams

Where do I begin to tell a story of how great a love can be

the sweet love story that is older than the seathe simple truth about the love she brings to meWhere do I startWith her first helloshe gave a meaning to this empty world of mineThere'd never be another love another timeShe came into my life and made the living fine

she fills my heart

she fills my heart with very special thingswith angel songs,with wild imaginingsShe fills my soul with so much lovethat anywhere I go I'm never lonely.With her along who could be lonelyI reach for her handit's always there

Love Story By Andy Williams (2)

How long does it last

Can love be measured by the hours in a day

I have no answers now but this much I can say:

I know I'll need her till the stars all burn away

and she'll be there (underline added)

Love Story By Andy Williams (3)

Is this a poem? What kind of Love is described here?

It depends. Some poetic elements: repetition, rimes. But what is poetry?

A fine combination of sound (rime, rhythm, meter, etc.) and sense (figurative language, irony, personification, etc.)? No.

Shocking us into a new awareness? No. Instead, it is a straightforward

celebration of a “romantic” love which falls in the tradition of “Romantic love.”

Examples?

Romeo and Juliet? 梁山伯與祝英台？ Madame Bovary? The Bridges of Madison County Rousseau?

Examples? Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Married to Therese Levasseur, whom, greatly inferior to him but “dearest” to him, he does not desire or love at all. (Hunt 304)

“chronically inconsistent” Sees as his true love Sophie d’Houdetot -- "I kis

sed her. What a kiss! But that was all"- "The light of every virtue adorned in my eyes the idol of

my heart; to have soiled that divine image would have been to destroy it … I told her a hundred times that, if it had been in my power to gratify myself, if she had put herself at my mercy of her own free will, except in a few short moments of madness I should have refused to purchase my own happiness at such a price. I loved her too well to wish to possess her“ (qtd Hunt 305)"

What is Romantic Love? Is it a Natural or Universal

Sentiment? “Romantic passion is a complex multifaceted

emotional phenomenon that is a byproduct of an interplay of biology, self, and society.

The desire for union or merger; Idealization of the beloved; Exclusivity; (e.g. always, never) Emotional dependency on or powerful em

pathy and concern for the beloved. Intrusive thinking about the love object (Cf.

Jankowiak 4-5)

Is it natural?

“natural” – in the biological or evolutionary senses;

“cultural” – human invented ritual. e.g. Kiss – see clips1. Natural -- for mammals; started with

feeding; memorable for procreation purposes

2. Cultural -- Many kinds Part of many rituals

What’s wrong with it?

Nothing wrong as an emotional or biological need, but—

1. Romantic love is not “Love.” 2. It is apparently a powerful feeling th

at seems to be unique and eternal, but actually --

Romantic love is

A cultural product with a lot of conventions (some plot elements or ways of rationalization);

e.g. to ignore or overcome its transience: carpe diem (seize the day); liebestod (love and

death) Part of the tradition of idealized love (e.g. c

ourtly love, Platonic love, neo-Platonic love, Romantic love). Idealization can lead to …

Romantic love’s Idealization can

involve objectification of women whose actual feelings are ignored and subjectivities denied;

Hide realities of inequality, commodification or the narcissistic nature of our desire.

Turn to fear, hatred or self-sacrifice because it is so powerful but probably one-sided. (e.g. femme fatal)

Not innocent: Be used to support rigid laws of gender oppression (e.g. chastity). The “canonical” love poems are not exempt from some “ideology” of love.

Romantic Love in the Romantic/Victorian Period.

Passionately in love + strong sexual inhibition

Romantics: Being demonstratively sentimental,

melancholic, tempestuous or tearful. Goethe and Beethoven– frequently in

love; Women: angels in the house (weak,

fearful, anxious to lean on and be dominated by a strong man.)

Victorian society – pinnacle of Romantic love, from which S. Freud’s theory arises.

CORSETS AND CRINOLINE ( 硬襯布襯裙 )

Women in the Victorian Age

Hysteric objects for psychoanalytic studies

Pre-Raphaelite women in paintings

portrait of Augustine: Ecstas

yBeata Beatrix

1864-70 

Women in the Victorian Age

“Mrs. B” her imagined lovemaking consists of lying in each other’s arms all night and kissing. “She was somewhat shocked and disgusted by

the experience of the wedding night. It seemed to her that her husband approached her with the violence of an animal. . . Coitus, though incomplete, took place some seven times on that first night . . . For two months subsequently there was great pain during intercourse…She eventually discovered that her husband’s abstinence from marital intercourse was due to infidelity.” (Havelock Ellis qtd in Hunt 338)

Love in the Modern Age?

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) from "Dover Beach"

                          

                                    

Edward Munch, Eye in Eye, 1894  contrasts sharply with conventional "love-at-first-sight" images popular in

the 19th-century (p. 55) 

Today?

In English language: “love” – “going out with someone,” “seeing someone” “involved,” “in a relationship.”

After two sexual revolutions (1920’s, 1960’s)

Hollywood films of Romantic love In Taiwan: 《人間四月天》 ( 許我一個未

來吧 )﹐ 《藍色大門》

Course Outline

Traditional Love Poems: New Critical Reading and Beyond

Love and Desire: Psychoanalysis Love and Bread: Marxism Love in Culture: Cultural StudiesNote: we are not limited to the topic

love, nor can we exhaust it.

New Critical Readings and Beyond

New Criticism: close reading; practical criticism; the “Text and Text Only” approach. Form and content united into an “organic whole.”

Beyond: Discussing the social context(s) it fails to

see. Challenging its underlying beliefs liberal

humanism.

Selected Love Poems

Shakespeare: Sonnet 130 “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun”

Courting sonnet in Romeo and Juliet (1591?)

John Donne “To his Mistress: Going to Bed”

Leonard Cohen “I’m Your Man”

Sonnet 130

Thesis: Instead of seeing his lover as a beautiful goddess and in absolute or unrealistic terms, the speaker describe his mistress and define his lover in relative terms in order to finally confirm his love.

Two kinds of comparison: 1. Worse (comparative “more) – e.g. less red,

worse than perfume, less pleasing than music yet he loves it;

2. Unlike ( More real) e.g. eyes, breasts, hair, walk.

3. As rare but the “truest” -- his “love” and his “language.”

Sonnet 130 -- Context

Seen as a sequence: Sonnet 127 to 152 bitter and wry reflections on the poet’s

sexual entanglement with a woman—who is, in turn, entangled with the youth at the expense of Shakespeare’s relations with both of them.”

Match the sardonic, misogynistic flavour of the early Jacobean court. . . (Jacob 36)

Courting sonnet in Romeo and Juliet

Thesis: The youngsters court or stay coy with misplaced conceits which combines the spiritual and sexual love in the ‘courtly love’ tradition.

Juliet’s Hands shrine; Juliet, a saint. Romeo: lips = pilgrims a palmer

(pilgrim) with palms Witty twist with “let lips do what hands

do” What? Pray kiss

Courting sonnet in Romeo and Juliet -- Context1. The play: Before the sonnet (their first conversatio

n), Romeo, like Byron in "She Walks in Beauty," compares Juliet to light or jewels at night and describes her as the first "true beauty“ he’s seen.

Romeo goes to the ball to find his girlfriend Rosaline, but not Juliet.

2. The film(s) –signs of impetuosity and sexuality

“To his Mistress: Going to Bed”

Thesis: As the speaker uses witty conceits to ask the lady to strip herself, the ideology of platonic love is challenged but not that of sex as male battle and conquer.

Witty challenge of Platonic love: 1. Combine the spiritual (e.g. heaven, chime) a

nd sensual, but see the latter as more important or at least the same with the former.

2. Puns with sexual connotations – labour, standing, “still can stand so nigh”, “hairy diadems,” “flesh upright”

“To his Mistress: Going to Bed”

3. Spiritual and natural images showing the sensual as something “better” and “natural”:

-- girdle as heaven’s zone, (body as a far fairer world)

-- body as flowery meads; as content of mystic books

-- souls unbodied = bodies unclothed -- fools who stop at breast plate or gems (tradit

ional poets?)-- innocence = birth clothes

John Donne in Context

Unsolved contradictions between Dr. Donne and Jack Donne

Neo-Platonic Love in Renaissance– Its governing ambiguity: “things and persons in the world are to be loved only for the sake of a spiritual beauty that transcends them, and yet the beautiful cannot be appreciated unless we love its manifestations in matter (Singer 195.)

Christianity (from being a Catholic to an Anglican prelate),

Neo-Ovidian (anti-idealistic): “artificial and self-conscious in their defense of sexual pleasures” (Singer 196)

John Donne in Context

e.g. “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” – unlike “dull-sublunary lovers, separation of the bodies does not hurt the union of ‘true’ lovers’ souls.

“The Extasie,” -- implies that love is a religious experience,

“Flea” sex is a religious experience

I’m Your Man: Close Analysis

postmodern parody/collage of traditional and contemporary images of love and masculinity (courtly romance, painting, fairy tales and Valentine )

Courting the Lady

Wedding

Mannered Courtship Wolf Desire Underneath

Love as something opportunist

Christ? Virgin Mary? Or . . . ?

I’m Your Man -- Context

Canadianism parodied Signs of the Canadian: The Group of S

even, Riding the Timber, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the maple leaf.

Reference

Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? Ed. William Jankowiak. Columbia University Press, 1995.

The Natural History of Love. Morton Hunt. New York: Anchor, 1994.

Nature of Love, Vol. 2: Courtly & Romantic. Irving Singer. University of Chicago Press, 1998. A beginner's guide to critical reading : an anthol

ogy of literary texts. Richard Jacobs. London ; New York : Routledge , 2001.

Readings for next week Chap 2. “Formalism ” EB Browning Sonnets 26 & 43

Mary Shelley “The Trial of Love”