Style articles from September 1995

Style archives from September 1995

A recipe for mourning: Isak Dinesen's "Babette's Feast."
September 22, 1995... When director Gabriel Axel's film version of "Babette's Feast" hit American movie screens in 1988, restaurants in major cities around the country offered the chance to enjoy the sumptuous feast served up in the movie.(1) For a hefty price,...

Watch and Ward: James's fantasy of Omnipotence. (Henry James)
September 22, 1995... In James's first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), the protagonist Roger Lawrence, whose recent marriage proposal to Miss Morton has just been rejected, meets and adopts an orphan, Nora Lambert, and raises her with the hopes of making her his ideal...

Foucault's response to Freud: sado-masochism and the aestheticization of power. (Michel Foucault; Sigmund Freud)
September 22, 1995... I. FOUCAULT'S SADO-MASOCHISTIC PARADIGM: THE "UNTHOUGHT" OF FREUD'S THEORY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS? Among the numerous modern theorists who have attempted to bring the insights of psychoanalysis to bear on political and social theory, Michel...

Perverse pleasure and fetishized text: the deathly erotics of Carter's "The Bloody Chamber." (Angela Carter)
September 22, 1995... It takes an iron nerve to perceive the connection between the promise of life implicit in eroticism and the sensuous aspect of death. Mankind conspires to ignore the fact that death is also the youth of things. Blind-folded, we refuse to see that...

Criminal pleasures, pleasurable crime. (pleasures of reading detective stories)
September 22, 1995... I. "I LIKED SOMEBODY BEING DEAD" What is it in the hard-boiled novel that hooks me, binds me to it, arrests me in the tracks of an otherwise intractable desire? Where, to be precise, am I to locate the pleasure I take in that novel - a...

Dickens with Kant and Sade. (violence in Charles Dickens' novels)
September 22, 1995... As the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius. Thomas De Quincey, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" In effect, the father's death opens the reign of violence. In choosing...

The heroine is being beaten: Freud, sadomasochism, and reading the romance.
September 22, 1995... In 1972, though Avon Books reluctantly published Kathleen Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower, its overwhelming popularity ushered in the current reading market in which popular romances comprise nearly fifty percent of all paperback sales.(1)...

"Contrary to the prevailing current?" Homoeroticism and the voice of maternal law in Forster's "The Other Boat." (E.M. Forster)
September 22, 1995... In his posthumously published "The Other Boat" (1972), E. M. Forster seeks to transform proscribed desire into a "confession of the flesh."(1) Captain Lionel March's "stumbling confession" and "open avowal" of having "'fallen for'" his bunkmate...

Autobiography and Postmodernism.
September 22, 1995... Autobiography and Postmodernism is more about autobiography than it is about postmodernism. Yes, the essays are grouped into two sections of equal length, but the overall emphasis is clearly on autobiography and the attempt to legitimate it as a...

Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory.
September 22, 1995... The most widely and frequently cited author in Feminist Measures is Adrienne Rich. This seems completely appropriate; as a major figure in women's poetry and feminist theory, Rich is a natural authority for work that considers the intersection of...

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.
September 22, 1995... In 1975, in "The Laugh of the Medusa," published in L'Arc, Helene Cixous argued for a revolutionary reconception of writing that would explode traditionalism and allow for what she then called ecriture feminine. Her intentions in this volume, a...