Imperial Masochism

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Thought this was going to be a review of the new Lynch film. My mistake.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com>
>Sent: Jan 4, 2007 4:42 PM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Imperial Masochism
>
>Kucich, John.  Imperial Masochism:
>   British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class.
>   Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006.
>
>British imperialism's favorite literary narrative
>might seem to be conquest. But real British conquests
>also generated a surprising cultural obsession with
>suffering, sacrifice, defeat, and melancholia. "There
>was," writes John Kucich, "seemingly a different
>crucifixion scene marking the historical gateway to
>each colonial theater." In Imperial Masochism, Kucich
>reveals the central role masochistic forms of
>voluntary suffering played in late-nineteenth-century
>British thinking about imperial politics and class
>identity. Placing the colonial writers Robert Louis
>Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and
>Joseph Conrad in their cultural context, Kucich shows
>how the ideological and psychological dynamics of
>empire, particularly its reorganization of class
>identities at the colonial periphery, depended on
>figurations of masochism.
>
>Drawing on recent psychoanalytic theory to define
>masochism in terms of narcissistic fantasies of
>omnipotence rather than sexual perversion, the book
>illuminates how masochism mediates political thought
>of many different kinds, not simply those that
>represent the social order as an opposition of mastery
>and submission, or an eroticized drama of power
>differentials. Masochism was a powerful psychosocial
>language that enabled colonial writers to articulate
>judgments about imperialism and class.
>
>The first full-length study of masochism in British
>colonial fiction, Imperial Masochism puts forth new
>readings of this literature and shows the continued
>relevance of psychoanalysis to historicist studies of
>literature and culture.
>
>http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8294.html
>
>Introduction
>
>FANTASY AND IDEOLOGY
>
>http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8294.html
>
>http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8294.pdf
>
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