male narratives demonstrates, through an impressively varied global range of authors, that the presumed monolith of Western culture-the Patriarchal Order-is fully porous. Just as something meaningful persists outside the significance of language, something uncanny, mythic, matrixial, operates with an affective power all around the presumably foreclosed fortress of the masculine subject. With admirable dexterity, Mooney blends affect studies, psychoanalysis and feminist narratology (to name only a few) into an astonishing anatomization of the anguished yearning between, among and beyond all the fathers and sons stuck in the amber of our totalized and totalizing understanding of 'masculinity'." --Garry Leonard, Professor of English, University of Toronto "The Making and Mirroring of Masculine Subjectivities is a broad-ranging taxonomy of masculinity as a relational and ethical phenomenon, exploring virtually every social and literary role a male character could be expected to assume in the modern and postmodern eras. So what, exactly, is Mooney doing here? Nothing less than reevaluating masculinity in global film and literature. She starts with the most obvious manifestation of patriarchal masculinity (paternity), but quickly juxtaposes it with that other classic masculine narrative pattern (the hero story) that appears to require its protagonist to be self-contained, independent, and all but unencumbered by filial ties. This is a book of remarkable ambition; even more remarkable is how well Mooney achieves what she sets out to do." --Eliot Borenstein, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University This book shows how diverse, critical modern world narratives in prose fiction and film emphasize masculine subjectivities through affects and ethics. Highlighting diverse affects and mental states in subjective voices and modes, modern narratives reveal men as feeling, intersubjective beings, and not as detached masters of master narratives. Modern novels and films suggest that masculine subjectivities originate paradoxically from a combination of copying and negation, surplus and lack, sameness and alterity: among fathers and sons, siblings and others. In this comparative study of more than 30 diverse world narratives, Mooney deftly uses psychoanalytic thought, narrative theories of first- and third-person narrators, and Levinasian and feminist ethics of care, creativity, honor, and proximity. We gain a nuanced picture of diverse postpaternal postgentlemen emerging out of older character structures of the knight and gentleman. Susan Mooney, professor of Comparative Literature at the University of South Florida, USA, is author of The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality: Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth-Century Novel (2008). |