Browsing by Subject "Masculinity in literature"
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Item The construction of male subjectivity by four contemporary Spanish women writers(2006) Cívico Lyons, Inmaculada Concepción; Higginbotham, VirginiaThis dissertation examines four contemporary Spanish women writers’ insight into the formation and development of male subjectivity in the context of socio-political and artistic status of women in democratic Spain. In this study I analyze the following novels: La voz dormida (2002) by Dulce Chacón, Azul (1994) by Rosa Regás, La señora Berg (1999) by Soledad Puértolas, and Fiebre para siempre (1994) by Irene Gracia. The narrative representation of men as a central theme by women can be considered a revolutionary event as women foreground themselves as subjects of a discourse, overthrowing the traditional dichotomy woman/object. By questioning men’s social and cultural positions, women writers adopt a new identity: that of the female observer writing male behavior. This younger generation of Spanish women writers questions the traditional definitions of gender roles and views masculinity as a set of impositions on male and female subjects. Gender tensions are represented in the novels as their male and female vii protagonists attempt to survive a world in crisis by either submitting to or resisting the impositions of power through external forces such as institutionalized religion, political mandates, and socially prescribed behavior. Each author focuses on different aspects of the strategic impositions of power. In these novels, accounts are given of why characters react to external forces in particular ways, and of the consequences of their behavior. Gender relation subtleties are defined as determined by cultural, social and psychological motivations. In order to illuminate the fictional construction of masculinity and gender relations in contemporary women’s narrative, I make use of the following theories: a) Michel Foucault’s explanations of power, knowledge, and discourse; b) Paul Smith’s understanding of the subject as a place of contradiction in which cultural practices are made concrete; c) Julia Kristeva’s linguistic and psychological theories in relation to the “subject-in-process”; and d) current sociological and anthropological notions of masculinity and gender relations. Contrary to the possibility of drawing a composite male character from these novels, we are faced with a sincere, not stereotyped account of males as fragmented beings in conflict with themselves and with the forces that shape their identities.Item Defeated heroes: constructions of masculinity in Weimar Republic battlefield notes(2006) Freitag, Björn Werner; Arens, Katherine, 1953-Drawing on fifteen battlefield novels written in Weimar Germany between 1928 and 1930, this dissertation examines various models of masculinity construction in terms of their cultural and political significance. A pioneer work, Erich Maria Remarque’s bestseller, Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) (1928/1929), was a major provocation that unleashed a Culture War. The Dolchstoßlegende, designed to account for the defeat of the German army, had not convinced everyone, so war veterans waited for a better explanation, which Remarque and other leftist-bourgeois novelists provided. Remarque’s group also included Ludwig Renn’s Krieg (1927/28), Edlef Köppen’s Heeresbericht (1930), Ernst Johannsen’s Vier von der Infanterie (1930), Ernst Glaeser’s Jahrgang 1902 (1928), Georg von der Vring’s Soldat Suhren (completed 1923, published 1927), Karl Federn’s Hauptmann Latour (1929), and Arnold Zweig’s Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (1927). Extreme opposition in this Culture War came from the right-wing militarists, including Franz Schauwecker’s Aufbruch der Nation (1929), Werner Beumelburg’s Die Gruppe Bosemüller (1930), Joseph Magnus Wehner’s Sieben vor Verdun (1930), and Hans Zöberlein’s Der Glaube an Deutschland (1931), who all sought to validate the war experience through disproportionate magnification of the German warrior-man. Alternative literary models, including Adrienne Thomas’ Die Katrin wird Soldat (1930), one of the rare war novels by a female author, as well as Theodor Plivier’s Des Kaisers Kulis (1930), and Adam Scharrer’s Vaterlandslose Gesellen (1930), reveal the war in its senseless inhumanity affecting men and women alike, thus serving as rare counterpoints to the dominant masculinist constructions. What this dissertation contributes to existing research is a new interpretive approach about how a text may play into public discourse. The prevailing images of German masculinity that had guided generations of German males were destroyed in the trenches. For ten years thereafter, war literature offered very little that individual male readers could use to reconstruct a positive image of the German man as a social and political being. Since traditional perceptions of masculinity had been shattered, literature had to take up the same war and rework its memory to have a therapeutic effect and fill this gap.