White men still hold most of the political and economic cards in the United States; yet stories about wounded and traumatized men dominate popular culture. Why are white men jumping on the victim bandwagon? Examining novels by Philip Roth, John Updike, James Dickey, John Irving, and Pat Conroy and such films as
Deliverance, Misery, and
Dead Poets Society—as well as other writings, including
The Closing of the American Mind—Sally Robinson argues that white men are tempted by the possibilities of pain and the surprisingly pleasurable tensions that come from living in crisis.
Inhoudsopgave
Introduction: Visibility, Crisis, and the Wounded White Male Body
Notes to Intorduction
One: Marked Men, Embodying America: John Updike and the Reconstruction of Middle American Masculinity
I. The ‘Discovery’ of Middle America and the Marking of White Masculinity
II. Rabbit Redux: Black Power, the Counterculture, and the Decentering of White Masculinity
III. Rabbit is Rich: Feminism, the Third World, and the Screwing of White Masculinity
Coda: The Death of White Masculinity?
Notes to Chapter One
Two: Pale Males, Dead Poets and the Crisis in White Masculinity: Scenes from the Culture Wars
I. Spectacles of (Dis)Embodiment
II. American Minds and American Bodies: Reproducing Elitism
III. Dead Poets and the Pathos of Wounded White Masculinity
Notes to Chapter Two
Three: Traumas of Embodiment: White Male Authorship in Crisis
I. The ‘Myth of Male Inviolability’: Somatic Disintegration in Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man
II. Rapists, Feminists and The World According to Garp: Authentic and Inauthentic Trauma
III: ‘Exercising Editorial Authority Over His Body: The Crippling of Body and Text in Stephen King’s Misery
Notes to Chapter Three
Four: Masculinity as Emotional Constipation: Men’s Liberation and the Wounds of Patriarchal Power
I. The Hazards of Being Male
II. The Wisdom of the Penis
III. The Embarrassments of Emotional Incontinence
Notes to Chapter Four
Five: Expression, Repression, and Male Hysteria: Marked Men and the Wounds of Patriarchal Power
I. Men’s Liberation Redux: Sexuality, Evolution, and the Embodied Struggle Between Blockage and Release
II. Damned if They Do, Damned if They Don’t: Deliverance and the Hysterical Male Body
III. Feminism and Masochism: The Prince of Tides and the Pleasure of Repression
Notes to Chapter Five
Works Cited
Over de auteur
Sally Robinson is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University and the author of
Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction.
Meer e-boeken van dezelfde auteur (s) / Editor
27.271 E-boeken in deze categorie
