Sublime enjoyment : on the perverse motive in American literature
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Sublime enjoyment : on the perverse motive in American literature
（Cambridge studies in American literature and culture, 112）
Cambridge University Press, 1997
Available at / 31 libraries
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Kobe Shoin Women's University Library / Kobe Shoin Women's College Library
A930.8||1||112H085136*
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Note
Bibliography: p. 171-176
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Linking classic American literature to contemporary popular culture, Sublime Enjoyment argues that the rational systems of normal social life are motivated and sustained by 'perverse' desires. This perversity arises from the failure of symbolic satisfactions - love, work, success - to make us happy, and from our refusal to accept that failure. Hoping to achieve satisfaction, we respond ultimately to situations that evoke older, more primary drives and their attendant emotions. But while a conventional pervert knows exactly what to want, the healthy pervert must find enjoyment inadvertently: in the object of the sublime, in duty and reason, and in the obligations of a 'fun morality'. Examining the ways in which this inadvertence is represented in American literature and culture, Dennis Foster identifies ways in which longings are linked to social forces.
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction: the problem with pleasure
- 2. The sublime community
- 3. Re-Poe Man: Poe's un-American sublime
- 4. Too resurgent: liquidity and consumption in Henry James
- 5. Alphabetic pleasures: The Names
- 6. J. G. Ballard's empire of the senses: perversion and the failure of authority
- 7. Fatal West: W. S. Burrough's perverse destiny
- 8. Conclusion: agency in the perverse
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index.
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