Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative
Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative By Peter Brooks
Publisher: Harvard University Press 1993 | 342 Pages | ISBN: 0674077245 | PDF | 16 MB
Publisher: Harvard University Press 1993 | 342 Pages | ISBN: 0674077245 | PDF | 16 MB
Brooks (humanities, Yale) focuses mainly on the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries; his interest is the body, primarily the female body as the object of the male gaze and cultural predispositions. Reading Rousseau, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Henry James, and Marguerite Duras with sensitivity, and always alert to elements that subvert expectations, he places their work in a broad cultural context that includes the nude in painting and in the thought of Freud, Lacan, and Georges Bataille. Especially interesting are his discussions of 19th-century salon nudes and the work of Courbet, Manet, and Gauguin. Curiously, Brooks's remarks on the body in contemporary advertising and the work of Mapplethorpe have less impact, as does his conclusion that "making the body signify--making it the protagonist of stories and the scene of stories--has not ended and will not end." For informed readers and specialists. - Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.