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On narrative and sexuality.
Ranging through films, television, lesbian novels, and narrative theory from Victor/Victoria to Star Trek: The Next Generation, from Barnes's Nightwood to Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text, Judith Roof charts how ideas of narrative and sexuality inform, determine, and reproduce one another. She identifies the paradigmatic lesbian story, its unvarying repetition, and how it might be recast.
For women, for lesbians and gays, for African Americans, for Asians, Native Americans, or any other self-identified and -identifying group, who can speak? Who has the authority to speak for these groups? Is there genuinely such a thing as "objectivity," or can only members of these groups speak, finally, for themselves? And who has the authority to decide who has the authority? This collection examines how theory and criticism are complicated by multiple perspectives in an increasingly multicultural society and faces head on the difficult question of what qualifies a critic to speak from or about a particular position. In different formats and from different perspectives from various disciplines, the contributors to this volume analytically and innovatively work together to define the problems and capture the contradictions and tensions inherent in the issues of authority, epistemology, and discourse.
A family builds an empire amid murder, betrayal, and the Civil War, in this saga by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of North and South. With the Civil War reaching its gory climax, the divided Kent family is pushed to the edge of complete destruction. With the advent of the transcontinental Union Pacific Railroad, the Kents continue to fight for their foothold among America’s wealthy founding families. While their private, insular war rages, young Jeremiah Kent is tempted by a calculating Southern belle into a trap of deceit, lust, and murder. There’s no turning back as the Kents’ destiny is set on an irreversible course alongside the great rebirth of America. This ebook features an illustrated biography of John Jakes including rare images from the author’s personal collection.
Shaken, not stirred--cultural critics look at the many faces of 007 and his creator.
Inviting us to "wallow in the middle," Judith Roof offers a fresh, inventive look at female comic secondary characters who, though never on center stage, play an indispensable role in enriching and complicating the course of the narrative. Paying attention to these characters shows that narrative is not always as straight as it might seem. Focusing on such superb comic seconds as Eve Arden, Thelma Ritter, Rosalind Russell, and Whoopi Goldberg, Roof explores what is queer about the middle--in the sense of eccentric and in terms of desire--and how that queerness functions as a part of and an antidote to narrative. Shrewd, pragmatic, self-denying, perceptive, outspoken, and witty, these female ...
Reproductions of Reproduction is about the loss of the paternal metaphor and how the ensuing scramble to relocate it has set off a series of representational crises. Examining the sudden popularity of such figures as cyborgs, bodybuilders, and vampires; shifts in legislation about abortion, paternity and copyright; the transition to a digital-based society; the emergence of lesbian and gay studies; the growing infatuation with hyper-realistic patterns in television, this book argues that each of these manifestations represents an attempt to resituate the paternal metaphor. While this shift affects our understandings of everything from narratives to law to time, it also suggests a point of potential political intervention, allowing us to identify the full implications of these changes.
Lesbianism in literature has been dealt with rather indirectly in the past. Editors have led readers to the "artistry" of a work containing lesbianism, emphasizing instead the literary history and historical context of the work rather than the representations of lesbianism. The editor for Colette's The Pure and the Impure, for instance, affirms that Colette has a knowledge of a "strange sisterhood," but assures readers she has never strayed from the "normal." In the groundbreaking A Lure of Knowledge, Judith Roof demonstrates that representations of lesbian sexuality occupy specific locations or positions in the arguments, subject matter, and rhetoric of Western European and American literar...
"... a work that builds a substantial bridge between Freudian psychoanalysis and radical feminist thought, particularly on the subject of lesbianism.... Presenting a complex argument about an issue vital to the psychoanalytic endeavor as well as to feminist theory, The Practice of Love should stimulate a reconsideration of 'perversion' and the construction of sexual fantasy. The illumination of the fantasies that make lesbian desire distinctive will necessarily open up our understanding of all sexuality." --Jessica Benjamin, New York Times Book Review "Teresa de Lauretis has entwined three books into one: a critical history of psychoanalytic theories of female homosexuality; a bold study of ...
Science and technology have had a profound effect on the way humans perceive space and time. In this book, an international team of authors explore themes of depth and surface, of real and conceptual space and of human/machine interaction. The collection is organized around the concept of Technospace--the temporal realm where technology meets human practice. In exploring this intersection the contributors initiate debate on a number of important conceptual questions: Is there a clear distinction between the real spaces of the body or the city, and the conceptual space of virtual reality?How are real and metaphorical spaces of electronic cultures quantified and regulated? Is there an ethics of technospace?Historically, the reception of new technologies has been invested with romantic idealism on the one hand and panic on the other. The authors argue that in order for utopian dreams to be tempered by ethical, humanistic needs, we have an urgent need to reveal, reflect upon and evaluate technospace and our relationship to it.