Narratives Of Love Research Articles

Romantic Adventures in Prose: Ren’ai Shōsetsu (Romance Novels) by Yuikawa Kei

Romantic Adventures in Prose:Ren’ai Shōsetsu (Romance Novels) by Yuikawa Kei Eileen B. Mikals-Adachi (bio) Dedicated to Satoko: Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. Anaïs Nin For centuries, writers have ventured into the world of romance and captivated audiences with narratives of love. This “long history and wide distribution” have distinguished romantic writing, and as Kay Mussell points out in Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of Women’s Romantic Fiction, the genre boasts “generations of readers reading romances in English and other languages.”1 In 2008, as testimony to this legacy, Japan commemorated the one-thousandth anniversary of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, described by Chieko Irie Mulhern in “Japanese Harlequin Romances as Transcultural Women’s Fiction” as “a grand romance chronicling the types and phases of love and marriage in court circles.”2 Throughout the nation, festivals, parades, moon-viewings, Genji-themed poetry readings, and other such events were held, and an array of memorabilia, including limited-edition snacks, tea, sake, and even Hello Kitty goods,3 was created. Though some might question Cathy McClellan’s categorization of The Tale of Genji as “the first romance novel,”4 these festivities to celebrate what Edward G. Seidensticker called “a very long romance”5 represent, in a sense, a milestone for a genre that has been [End Page 85] ridiculed and devalued as long as it has been in existence and as long as it has been read. Yet, despite the fact that scores of romance writers and countless readers surely hailed this phenomenal feat, criticism of the genre remains unchanged even in the land that honored the legacy of what some consider to be its prototype. Just as The Tale of Genji was not considered to be “high” literature in its day, so ren’ai shōsetsu, or Japanese romance novels, are still viewed as a “low” form of writing in many literary circles. As Mulhern points out, “such classification is of particular significance in Japan, where the distinction between junbungaku (‘pure’ or mimetic literature) and taishū bungaku (mass or popular literature) is all but institutionalized.”6 Consequently, these works have clearly not yet been “gentrified,” a term coined in Elaine Wethington’s “Are Academic Opinions about Romance All Negative?” in reference to a genre that is still not considered “art” by “members of educated classes and critics.” 7 However, such “critics” do not seem to be the voice of the masses. Just as ren’ai shōsetsu in a sense fit Maria Bustillos’s definition of romance novels as “underground writing, almost never reviewed or discussed in the newpapers or literary rags, or a dinner party,”8 so these works can also be seen as a subgenre of one of the public’s (or at least half of the public’s) most savored forms of writing. Perhaps in the future ren’ai shōsetsu will join the ranks of Heian or Meiji fiction written by Japanese women writers—works that, although initially considered “low” literature, are, as Mulhern points out, “now legitimately accepted as mimetic literature.”9 For the time being, however, such novels remain low in literary rankings, and as a result research on this genre is lacking. Sales, in contrast, are consistently high, and in today’s consumer’s world, where the popularity of any genre is based on such numbers, ren’ai shōsetsu, like romance novels in general, are clearly a success. This can, of course, be attributed to loyal readers, for even if society “disapproves”—and regardless of how embarrassed they are “supposed” to be for indulging in this genre—readers of romance novels are perhaps the most devoted of booklovers. As Julie Bosman explains in her New York Times article “Lust Tales and Hot Sales: Romance E-Books Thrive,” “the romance reader is a little like the Asian carp: insatiable and unstoppable.”10 And as Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley point out in Girl Reading Girl in Japan, “although the reading girl is a feature of many modern cultures, she has a particularly long tradition...

Dark-Skinned Love Stories

In recent years academic scholarship and the public imagination has focused on the love lives (or lack thereof) of black women. In response and reaction to the recent so-called black love epidemic I interrogate claims about black women's failure at love and critique the ways that black women are often blamed for their cultural positionality. Framing my personal story with Toni Morrison's fictional character Pecola Breedlove, I discuss the role of sexism and colorism in the context of heterosexual love narratives. I use autoethnography, references to popular culture, and interdisciplinary scholarship to discuss my personal journey of identity, identification, and transformation as an unmarried dark-skinned woman.

Aphrodite's Faces: Toni Morrison's Love and Ethics

This study seeks to examine the ethical import of Morrison's eighth novel, Love (2003), through analysis of its narrative forms. With a complex weaving of narrative voices that offer oppositional points of views, Love demands that readers reconsider what they have been told. By foregrounding narrative ethics as the figurative, as showing rather than telling and signifying, this paper closely examines Love 's narrative voices.

A Labour of Love? Academics in Business Schools

Summary This paper contributes to a growing literature on new public management in relation to academia in general but more specifically UK business schools. Following interviews with a range of staff in universities, we explore the impact that auditing and monitoring interventions have made on academics and their identities. In some senses, academic identities would appear to have changed as a result of managerialist practices of audit, league tables, research assessments, and other measures of accountability for performance. In exploring our data we were struck by the extent to which our respondents drew upon various narratives of love in accounting for their experiences and so we sought to frame our analysis around conceptions of romantic, unconditional and pragmatic love. We also found that with few exceptions, our respondents were complicit rather than resistant to new public management demands for audit, accountability and performance and we sought to understand this in terms of the management of academic identities. Despite their compliance, however, considerable disquiet and dissatisfaction was expressed such that the romantic notion of a ‘labour of love’ where work is an end in itself is being stretched to its limits as academics are increasingly subjected to loveless or instrumental demands.

The Word Known to All Men; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love James Joyce

The Word Known to All Men; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love James Joyce Jeffrey Longacre (bio) Kiberd, Declan . 2009. Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece. New York: Norton. $28.95 hc. $17.95 sc. xi + 400 pp. Utell, Janine . 2010. James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery, Desire. New York: Palgrave. $75.00 hc. x + 177 pp. John Lennon—a closet James Joyce scholar who even subscribed to the James Joyce Quarterly in the 1970s—claimed in the 1967 hit song by The Beatles that "all you need is love." Since its original publication in 1922, some critics have suggested that love is all you need to break through the thorny thicket of complexity presented by Joyce's experimental style in Ulysses (not to mention the subsequent, and even more daunting, Finnegans Wake in 1939), a style that shifts and evolves from episode to episode. Joyce himself hinted that the novel was his epic affirmation of that "[w]ord known to all men," as [End Page 131] his literary alter-ego Stephen Dedalus puts it in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses (Joyce 1986,429-430). That "word" is widely interpreted as love, and love is the subject of Joyce's great, human epics. Reading Ulysses simultaneously as Joyce's treatise on the nature of love and as a kind of love letter to love is nothing new. The most widely accepted theory on why Joyce selected June 16, 1904 as the date his epic of a single day takes place is because that was possibly the date that he first went out with his lifelong partner and future wife, Nora Barnacle. Such a reading makes the book, on one level, a kind of anniversary present, a token of love for the love of Joyce's life. One of the originators of the theory that the date of Ulysses had this biographical origin, Richard Ellmann, is also one of the first proponents of the idea that, in spite of all the stylistic bells and whistles, the "theme in Ulysses was simple" (Joyce 1986, ix). Ellmann and others have established an interpretive tradition that Ulysses is essentially about love, the entire spectrum of love from the eros to agape. According to this interpretation, Joyce's epic fits into a tradition of narratives of love and reconciliation in an attempt to apply epic conventions to subject matter that is all-too-human. Or, as Ellmann himself puts it, "Ulysses revolts against history as hatred and violence, and speaks in its most intense moments of their opposite" (xiv), namely Stephen's "word known to all men." Despite ostensible differences in tone, style, and method, Declan Kiberd and Janine Utell both recognize that Ulysses is concerned with love as the most complex and the most human of emotions. Each text offers a critical reappraisal of Joyce's work emphasizing what one can still learn from reading Joyce in the early twenty-first century, and how one might learn again to love reading Joyce. As a result, their books represent an important step in restoring a sense of humanity to an author whose texts have been relegated to the status of relics for specialists. "Ulysses" and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece, Declan Kiberd's ode to the ordinary in Ulysses, attempts to find some middle ground between the extremes of unabashed praise and unqualified contempt by arguing that what makes the book great is exactly that which it celebrates: its humanness. Kiberd's task, taken up by others before him, is to save Joyce's book from its abstraction into inscrutable theory by "specialist elites" (2009, 10) and to return it into the hands of the ever-elusive "common reader" (17). He argues that Ulysses "should be accessible to ordinary readers as once were the Odyssey, the New Testament, the Divine Comedy and Hamlet" (21). Making an argument that Joyce was as much Romantic as Modern in his celebration of the minutiae of everyday life, Kiberd claims that "[i]t is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people," for it—according to Kiberd...

A moment's ornament: the poetics of nympholepsy in ancient Greece

From Hesiod's first person account of his encounters with the Muses on Mount Helikon to Theokritos' nymphs, love between goddesses and mortal men provides the ancient Greeks with way of articulating both the genealogical and cultic connection to their gods and to their past. A Moment's Ornament examines the theme of nympholepsy-the experience of being seized by nymph or goddess-in ancient Greek cult and poetry from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. In poetry, this topos, which is ubiquitous in many of the most well-known ancient Greek sources, focuses on the figure of the goddess, or nymph, who falls in love with mortal man and subsequently bears mortal child. The theme also finds its way in ritual as stories of encounters between divinities and mortal men give rise to sanctuaries centering on nymphs and nympholepts. Beyond the individual dimension of the nympholeptic experience, these narratives are also integrated within the community through both poetry and shrines. Nympholeptic narratives thus articulate key elements of the bond between mortals and immortals and the connection between myth and ritual in ancient Greece. Both the cave sanctuaries founded by ancient nympholepts and the poets' narratives of love between goddesses and their mortal lovers function as a moment's ornament by preserving the memory of an encounter with the otherworldly at the intersection between myth and cult.

Black Love is Not a Fairytale

In 2009, the public witnessed an upsurge in media discussions about the lower marriage rates of professional black women. In the Unmarriageable Professional Black Woman discourse, the alleged pathological behavior of black men or black women causes marriage disparities, despite the fact that demographic data that can largely account for differences in marriage rates. This paper explores articulations of a heterosexual, and somewhat heteronormative, black female romantic imagination in the twenty-first century, and unpacks how the ideals and pathologies that subjects with various agendas attach to this imagination reveal the complex interplay of western romantic love narratives, black feminism, legacies of the Moynihan Report, and liberal individualism. Through discussions of three prominent examples representing the romantic desires of ambitious and successful black women in popular discourse, I explore how the heterosexual African American woman’s romantic imagination has been idealized and derided, with the idealization reflecting the ways in which feminism has done significant work in updating the romantic fantasy even as patriarchy’s presence is transparent, and the derision illustrating the disciplinary work of patriarchy and a broader national ideology that suggests that individuals are always responsible for not attaining their heart’s desires.

Repeat of the return to the origin or the Produce of a new species? : Narrative of Love and the political

Repeat of the return to the origin or the Produce of a new species? : Narrative of Love and the political

Negotiated Familism: Intimate Life and Individualization Among Young Female Professionals from Mexico City

This analysis explores narratives of love, marriage, and couple relationships among young female professionals from Mexico City. It seeks to address a dearth of knowledge about transformations of intimacy among the middle sectors of Mexican society. In this context, it raises questions about possible trends toward an individualization of intimate life and the dynamics of intimate citizenship experienced by young urban women. The argument is grounded in 21 life story interviews with young women employed in a range of white-collar occupations in Mexico City. The article highlights the salience of a “negotiated familism” in the interview narratives. While all participants saw family as an essential source of social and personal stability, they also experienced their lives as free from direct paternalistic control. Consequently, life projects built around notions of self-actualization, love, and self-fulfillment were central to their narratives. These findings point to partially individualistic modes of experience among young middle-class women while, at the same time, drawing attention to fundamental disjunctions from models of individualization developed in the Global Northwest.

Creation, Theological Imagination and Questions about Discipleship

AbstractScience yields factual data about the unfolding nature of the universe that challenges us profoundly and with urgency. This data verifies we are living in a dynamic world within a dynamic universe that is still in the process of creation. This process is wrought with risk and is also defined by relationships that emerge from the most basic elements of life. These times require a new cosmology. Haught reminds us that the adventurous narrative of love and liberation at work beneath the surface available to science is the work space of theologians. The patterns of relationships in all life forms evoke the image of the Trinity as a communion of relations. Discovering a new way of seeing requires doing theology in new ways and Delio notes this means a search for the newness of God evident in the New Testament. Ultimately, new ways of seeing require examining discipleship. Contemplation through the ages permits us to grasp that this Trinity of Love is our God who dwells with us. Our insight into God continually unfolds in history through the continuity of the Paschal Mystery of Christ in his incarnation, death and resurrection. Profound suffering, disaster and tragedy mark the age in which we live. Yet God is not absent. The call to discipleship with the One who has realized God's presence among us in the Paschal Mystery is a realization of a humility that is far removed from power, control and domination. We discover a humble God in the place of the poor because this is how God has become incarnate among us.

Ealing's Colour Aesthetic: Saraband for Dead Lovers

When Ealing’s first Technicolor film, Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), was released in 1948, critics were divided over its merits both as a colour film and an Ealing production. In a summary of critical reviews of the film that appeared in The Cinema Studio, the Daily Worker claimed it had ‘seldom seen Technicolor used to such superb effect’, while the Daily Express regarded the Technicolor as ‘subdued’ and ‘gloomy’. The Daily Herald described the colour photography as ‘pictorially, a lesson to Hollywood’, yet the Daily Mail listed it as ‘lurid and ferocious’. Dilys Powell, in The Sunday Times, summed up both sides by noting that earlier audiences might have been excited ‘by the audacity of the colour-designing’ but these days they were unlikely to be ‘dazzled by it’ (C.A.W. 1948b: 16). Ealing Studios’ aesthetic approach was also questioned. The Evening Standard stated the combination of topic and budget had ‘overwhelmed’ the small studio, the Evening News noted that ‘the film leans towards the theatrical’ in place of the ‘preferred . . . more realistic treatment’, and many reviews mirrored the Daily Graphic’s commentary on spectacle overshadowing human character and narrative: ‘The film is rich in everything but emotional quality’ (C.A.W. 1948b: 16). In the years since its release, Saraband for Dead Lovers has continued to stand in opposition to the traditional view of Ealing’s black-and-white documentary-realist tradition. A period drama with lush, extravagant costumes and sets, the film is a melodramatic narrative of love and forbidden sexuality in seventeenth-century Hanover, filmed in striking Technicolor. To explore how this potent use of colour cinematography challenged the Ealing aesthetic, this essay will combine historical analysis of the film’s production history and contemporary critical reception with textual analysis of how colour was used to create and add meaning to character and narrative events. Applying this synthesis to Saraband

Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passionby Ethel S. Person, M.D. Arlington, Va., American Psychiatric Publishing, 2007, 405 pp., $31.50.

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ForumFull AccessDreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic PassionELIZABETH K. HAASE M.D.,ELIZABETH K. HAASE M.D.Search for more papers by this author,Published Online:1 Jun 2008https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.08010152AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail If, as it has been said, love is the gift of oneself, then Dr. Person has given much of herself indeed. A affiliationd psychoanalyst, whose extensive writings in the fields of gender, sexuality, and erotic attachment were published together in The Sexual Century (1999) , Dr. Person now offers a reissue of her 1988 work, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters . This is a great book, one that puts a rich understanding of the narratives of love that lead so many patients to our doors into clear and accessible language, unburdened by psychiatric jargon. Dr. Person writes in her introduction, “love has been one of the most profound interests of my life since I was no more than twelve.” While I suspect she is not alone in this, I soon join her, curled up on the couch in pleasure, as she weaves an abundance of classic love stories from film and fiction into her illustrations of the dynamics of love. Her book is organized in five sections, describing in sequence the experience, aims, struggles, gender differences, and fates of love. This is a panoramic description of human love; it takes our clichés and explains them, moving skillfully from easily recognized types of love, such as love that develops on the rebound or with separation, to offering multiple clinical and theoretical windows into such phenomena.Dr. Person takes particular care to describe the liberating, transcending, and creative aspects of love, giving inspiring examples of relationships that allowed the participants to triumph over psychic limitations and pain. Yet, she in no way minimizes the problems clinicians and subjects face in dealing with love, including the risks of merging, submission, and the hostility that lies below its surface. Her chapter on self-surrender is particularly strong, especially in its insightful discussion of the type of surrender to love which enhances the self, versus the type which masochistically degrades it, and the dynamics of autonomy, dependency, and narcissism which underlie neurotic problems of this type. These dynamics lead her naturally into a chapter on the power in love. Here she covers the precariousness and the subtle but inevitable teeter-totter of power that exists in seduction, possession, idealization, caretaking, and other elements of the love relationship. She also helps the reader to see how traces of guilt, coercion, sadism, and contempt can tip these elements towards the pathologic.In Chapter 9, “Triangles,” the classical Oedipal situation serves as a launching point for an innovative exploration of other triangular arrangements in couples. Distinguishing “rivalrous triangles,” in which one competes for the lover, from “split object triangles,” in which one divides one’s attention between two love objects, Dr. Person deftly shows how defensive moves such as arranging to be desired by two rivals rather than competing with a rival for another can be seen in our love stories. Chapter 11, entitled “Modes of Self-Realization,” also provides a wealth of innovative psychoanalytic ideas, many departing from classical theory, to help the reader understand such commonalities as a woman’s relatively greater fear of rejection in love. Here the clinical reader will be particularly helped by insights into possible patient dynamics.Reprinted essentially without modification, this is not the right book for those seeking a contemporary update in gender studies or biological research on sexuality. A few statements, such as “the quest for an ideal love relationship...is the only quest readily available to most women except for motherhood,” may seem anachronistic to the modern reader. But, as a clinician who struggled alongside her female patients as their desires for a committed relationship were met by male flight, despite advances in feminism, and as someone who recognizes with Dr. Person the importance of “the passionate quest as…the central theme of our lives,” I know of no more encyclopedic or enriching entry into this field.New York, N.Y.Book review accepted for publication January 2008 (doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.08010152). FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 165Issue 6 June, 2008Pages 779-780THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY June 2008 Volume 165 Number 6 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 June 2008 Published in print 1 June 2008

The Write to Rock: Racial Mythologies, Feminist Theory, and the Pleasures of Rock Music Criticism

The Write to RockRacial Mythologies, Feminist Theory, and the Pleasures of Rock Music Criticism Daphne A. Brooks (bio) Witness how, in the hands of tenacious D, the self-proclaimed "greatest rock band of all time," the history of rock and roll—a hallowed history that mainstream rock music critics have been repeating in varied forms for decades now—comes to life in all its delicious absurdity. In the ironically sincere film epic Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny that history gets passed down from "wise man" Ben Stiller to the duo known as "the D," his lordliness Jack Black and fellow swashbuckling power folk metal shredder Kyle Gas. Huddled together in a dimly lit room located deep in the bowels of Guitar Center, our two heroes absorb the tales of a "magical" guitar pick that moves mysteriously through the hands of famed blues men and axe-wielding metal gods. Equal parts grotesque camp and loving, reverential affection, The Pick of Destiny's version of rock history—a blend of skull and bones secrecy, Da Vinci Code conspiracy, Arthurian legend, and Middle-earth grandeur—exposes the inflated mythologies of rock music culture and criticism for what they in fact are—"mythologies." At the same time the film embraces, enhances, and perpetuates these myths in "supranatural" proportions.1 Arguably, no artist has been inflated to greater "supranatural" proportions in the history of rock music criticism than his highness, "the Bard," Bob Dylan. In the case of Dylan it most surely is his iconographic "mythos" that remains a central element of not only rock and roll history but, more broadly, how critics of the past several decades write about popular music in American culture.2 Any music wonk will tell [End Page 54] you that Dylan persists as a revered if surprisingly confounding racial trickster in popular music culture—one whose recordings continue to spark debates about "love and theft" and the myth of rock and roll's origins. His most recent effort, 2006's much-lauded Modern Times, for instance, lifts huge swathes of arcane lyric from Henry Timrod, aka "the poet laureate of the Confederacy," only to cut and mix it, as Greil Marcus has astutely pointed out to me, with the compositional aesthetics of multiple black bluesmen, men who were no doubt driven to the blues by the historical traumas that Timrod and his army sought to protect and perpetuate.3 Dylan's late-career "master works," as many critics often refer to his last three studio recordings, are no doubt rich, iconic examples of the kinds of electric spectacles of racial miscegenation and transgressive social encounters that, in part, shape and fuel dominant narratives in rock music criticism. Love and Death. Love and Theft. The sexed-up, necrophilic dalliances of white (musical) masters and the (always) black, (most often) men that they admire and desire, consume and cannibalize continue to hold center stage in the critical imaginaries of performance studies and rock music histories alike. Huck and Jim on a raft. Clapton and Hendrix in a deadly embrace. Into the woods with Kurt and Leadbelly. These are the historical mythologies that dominate our narratives of racial appropriation and fetishization. And yet for a few years now I have been making a public plea in rock critic gatherings organized by my colleagues Ann Powers, Eric Weisbard, and others at Seattle's Experience Music Project Museum for "new narratives of love and theft."4 To be sure, the Bob Dylan blackface romance, a synecdoche for a much broader passion in rock music criticism, always threatens to recycle the racial and gendered biases of cultural appropriation debates plaguing pop culture since the rise of minstrelsy. Dylan hagiography reminds me only of the fact that when rock and roll criticism talks about cultural appropriation, these discussions far too often remain coded as homosocial affairs. Instead of awakening us to the kinds of cultural "thefts" that remain presently absent in rock memory, instead of forcing us to talk in more specific terms about the very gendered economy of the cultural appropriation wars, Dylan's musical borrowings have somehow managed to foreclose sustained conversations about the conservation of stable masculinities in these sorts...

Manuscripts and Broadsheets. Narrative Genres and the Communication Circuit among Working-Class Youth in early 20th-Century Finland

This article explores the hazy boundary between folklore and literature, orality and literacy in relation to the individual and the community. How do people who belong to the first generation of active writers in their family and community express their own expe- riences through fictional narratives and the literary tradition? This question is explored in relation to the working-class youth in the small industrial community of Karkkila (Hogfors) in southern Finland. The most important research materials are the editions of hand-writ- ten newspapers written by these young people from 1914 to 1925. My theoretical background is derived from both folklore studies and book history. Inspired by the research of Robert Darnton, I have outlined the communication circuit of the work- ing-class youth during the early 20th century, discussing the position of the manuscript tradition (hand-written newspapers, manuscript songbooks, minutes) in relation to the printed texts (books, newspapers, broadsheets) and the oral tradition. In my article I focus on the narratives of love in the manuscripts written by the working-class youth. How do they work with the ideas and narrative genres and themes adopted from the printed media and the oral tradition? I outline fictionalization of personal experiences and localization of fictional, printed texts as two basic narrative strategies utilized in these processes. Narrative as a theoretical concept and as a methodological tool has been inten- sively discussed both by folklorists and literary historians. This article explores the hazy boundary between folklore and literature, orality and literacy, in rela- tion to the individual and the community. How do people who belong to the first generation of active writers in their family and community express their own experiences through fictional narratives and the literary tradition? My conclusions are based on a case study of the literary activities of young work- ing-class people in Karkkila (Hogfors) 1 , a small industrial community in south- ern Finland, in the 1910s and 1920s. During this period, the young men and women of this community produced a large collection of hand-written newspapers named Valistaja (The Enlightener). The paper was confiscated by the police in 1926 be- cause of the communist political orientation of its writers. It provided a medium for discussing political questions and practising literary genres. At the beginning of the 1980s, a pile of issues of The Enlightener was found in the attic of the local

Christian Oster: From Courtly Love to Modern Malaise

Even a cursory glance at Christian Oster's work shows an author hard at work drafting a new lover's map. From Volley-ball (1989) to Mon grand appartement (1999), Oster aimed to redefine the landscape of desire for a postmodern and post-romantic environment. If anything, his most recent production has not deviated from this goal. Indeed, Une femme de menage (A Maid) (2001), Dans le train (In the Train) (2002), Les rendez-vous (2003), and L'imprevu (The Unforeseen) (2005), set the stage for an even more rigorous investigation of love, its vagaries, and modus operandi. 1 Of course, the type of love that Oster investigates is a far cry from the fatuous sentimentality of Hallmark cards and contemporary telenovellas. Rather, it is a love anchored in the domestic and the trivial. It is a minimal love, more concerned with the mundane inner workings of the human heart (ludus), and remarkably unconcerned with pathos (mania). It is a love tempered by stoicism; this love does not amount to indifference, but seeks freedom from passion, which, etymologically, incorporates anguish and suffering. In his most recent works, Oster has gone to great pains to expound an Ars Amatoria that, unsurprisingly, draws from a familiar historical model: courtly love. Eros has always played a crucial part in Oster's fiction, but even more so in his current output. In his last novels, we encounter the same amiable losers, always looking for love, drifting between the loss of a former lover and the desire for a new one. Mihaela Voicu has argued that in Chretien de Troyes' Lancelot —and by extension, in all courtly love narratives—the hero is driven by a single thought, and that… all his acts are subordinated to his amorous contemplation. 2 Love, then, becomes the hero's idee fixe; it is all he thinks and seemingly cares about. And yet, that love cannot be consummated, lest the noble lover dishonor the object of his amorous longing, and himself in the process; one could argue that courtly love narratives cease to embody fine amor once love passes from desire to attainment. Thus it is incompleteness and lack that remain the mainstays of courtly love romances. In Lancelot, the eponymous hero conceives a passion for Queen Guenevere, though she is married to King Arthur and, in other

La Cort d'Amor: A Critical Edition

Edited by Matthew Bardell. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 11). Oxford, Legenda, 2002. Pb £14.50; $25.00. This Occitan allegorical narrative, untitled in the sole manuscript (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 819), was first called La Cort d'Amor by Constans in 1881. The title is defensible on internal grounds (‘aqesta cort,’ l. 1336), though one could argue for Lo Zutgament d'Amor (that is, Jutgamen, cf. l. 34) or Lo Parlament d'Amor (‘Aqi s'asis a parlament/Amors,’ ll. 95–96) on the grounds that either one is just as descriptive, occurs sooner in the text, and avoids the problematic association with the myth that real people actually behaved this way. Bardell provides a text with a facing translation, notes, and an introduction. The presence of faint passages and controversial readings makes it unfortunate that he did not consult the manuscript itself but relied on microfilm. Bardell proposes that the work responds to Andreas Capellanus' De amore, written about 1185 for the court of Champagne, and hazards that the Cort was written in the same time and place. He relies on an obscure allusion to eight-score ladies and girls who are said to have made a new love for or out of a lady of great worth (ll. 21–25), possibly referring to the sixty ladies who helped Marie de Champagne adjudicate a point in Andreas. Furthermore, ‘the gallicisms in our text suggest circulation in northern courts such as that of Marie de Champagne’ (p. 14). These gallicisms (listed on pp. 161–62) are not explicated satisfactorily, however. It is not clear without discussion why the odd-looking luei (standard Occitan lui, Old French lui) or potra (Occitan porra, French porra) should be considered gallicisms. Other examples put forward seem stronger, but the argument needs further reflection. Do the gallicisms show that the Cort d'Amor circulated in northern courts, perhaps at the court of Champagne — where most people did not speak Occitan — or do they suggest a French scribe working in Occitania? Concluding overconfidently that ‘our manuscript witness is a mid- to late thirteenth-century Italian copy of a late twelfth-century work which shows linguistic evidence of circulation in northern France’ (p. 36), Bardell claims that the Cort is ‘older than Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose,’ and that therefore ‘Guillaume can no longer be accorded the honour of having invented the allegorical romance’ (p. 12). But no one has dated the manuscript as early as mid-century; the circulation of the Cort d'Amor in northern France remains speculative, and its dating so early is even more uncertain. More persuasively, Bardell argues that the figure of Amor is presented as a man despite one case of feminine agreement, and that the series of Amor's ten barons constitutes an allegorical narrative of love's progress. His reading of the allegory is sensitive and convincing. This challenging text has waited too long for a reliable edition. Bardell has advanced our understanding appreciably, but manifold uncertainties remain.

The Compelling Nature of Romantic Love: A Psychosocial Perspective

This paper combines psychoanalysis with socio-cultural theory in order to illuminate the vicissitudes of romantic love. Contemporary sociological theory argues that we are witnessing a new discourse of intimacy in popular culture and in everyday narratives of love and relationships. In a postmodern age, the need for or belief in romantic love might seem unreconstructed and naive, but romantic love retains a compelling hold in contemporary culture and psychoanalysis can help to explain why. This paper demonstrates the need for a socio-psychoanalytic analysis of love ideals and love talk via case material from two female interviewees from different generations and it will discuss what romantic love means for them. It will argue that there is a complex interaction between one's psychic and social self, and demonstrate that it is by analysing this dynamic interplay that we can understand why romantic love is desired and deconstructed in one case, but remains decathected and uninterrogated in the other.

Egypt in Greco-Roman History and Fiction

more than a representation. In his 1971 survey of the subject, C. Froidefond characterized Greek views of Egypt as a mirage, an imaginative vision that had as much to do with who the Greeks were as it had with who the Egyptians were.1 Edward Said's 1978 landmark work on orientalism traced how that Egyptian mirage developed and endured over the years in response to Europe's own evolving identity, and his book made a strong case for what has become a key idea in cultural studies: Power follows knowledge, and the seemingly objective and scientific study of other cultures is often an accessory to the crimes committed by empires in the name of civilization.2 The enormous-and often nasty-controversy that swirled around the publication of Martin Bernal's Black Athena, with its accusation of racism in the conduct of European historiography, particularly in the treatment of the relationship between Europe and Egypt, has dealt a devastating blow to the pose of objectivity in the conduct of scholarship.3 Despite this controversy, or perhaps because of it, the peculiar position of Egypt in the imaginations of the Greeks and Romans and its role in the classical world continue to be a subject of the greatest interest. I wish to contribute to this discussion by looking at the role Egypt plays in the so-called Greek romances, prose narratives of love and adventure that were composed during the Roman empire. I will begin by selectively sketching ideas about Egypt in Greek and Roman letters as a context for my remarks.4

Constructing a Narrative of Love: Early Romantic Poems of Kaifi Azmi

Constructing a Narrative of Love: Early Romantic Poems of Kaifi Azmi

"A Shakespeare for the people'? Negotiating the popular in Shakespeare in Love and Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream

The mainstream Shakespeare film occupies a complex and precarious space at the intersection of high and popular culture. This essay explores the ways in which two recent Hollywood Shakespeares, John Madden's Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Michael Hoffman's adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999), negotiate this space. In particular, it examines both films' deployment of an over-emphasized romantic love narrative as a perceived point of continuity between the Shakespearean play and the Hollywood blockbuster, and discusses the extensive referencing of high culture that characterizes these films. It also assesses the extent to which each film is able to embrace the popular and dispense with the oppositional system of differentiation by which high and popular culture are identified.