IV Killing Puck

[alice wellintown]

In this classic work, often described as "The History of the Rise,
Decline, and Fall of the Love Affair," Denis de Rougemont explores the
psychology of love from the legend of Tristan and Isolde to Hollywood.
At the heart of his ever-relevant inquiry is the inescapable conflict
in the West between marriage and passion--the first associated with
social and religious responsiblity and the second with anarchic,
unappeasable love as celebrated by the troubadours of medieval
Provence. These early poets, according to de Rougemont, spoke the
words of an Eros-centered theology, and it was through this "heresy"
that a European vocabulary of mysticism flourished and that Western
literature took on a new direction.

Bringing together historical, religious, philosophical, and cultural
dimensions, the author traces the evolution of Western romantic love
from its literary beginnings as an awe-inspiring secret to its
commercialization in the cinema. He seeks to restore the myth of love
to its original integrity and concludes with a philosophical
perspective on modern marriage.



On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 4:09 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Romance in the Western World. A Pynchon source. The Zoyd and Hector
> partnership is obviously the closest to these two in IV. As I said, we
> can read Bigfoot's love for his dead partner as a courtly love. That
> is, it is idealized because it is dead, like chivalry. Mark D.
> Hawthorne has traced P's homoerotic "continuum" from the Slow Learner
> tales to the novels...jargon and buttercups and  whatknots to plow
> through, but worth putting on a baseball cap for.
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 3:57 PM, Robin Landseadel
> <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>> "It was a romance over the years at least as persistent as Sylvester and
>> Tweety's."
>>
>> On Dec 15, 2009, at 12:50 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>>> I'ts more dialectic than debate; more conversation than argument. We
>>> can discard the word "partner" if that helps us to improve our reading
>>> of the relationship.
>>
>>
>