Love, and the different manifestations of it, is a common theme in literature around the world. In Cosmopolitan Love , Sijia Yao examines the writings of D. H. Lawrence, a British writer whose ...literature focused primarily on interpersonal relationships in domestic settings, and Eileen Chang, a Chinese writer who migrated to the United States and explored Chinese heterosexual love in her writing. While comparing the writings of a Chinese writer and an English one, Yao avoids a direct comparison between East and West that could further enforce binaries. Instead, she uses the comparison to develop an idea of cosmopolitanism that shows how the writers are in conversation with their own culture and with each other. Both D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang wrote stories that are influenced by—but sometimes stand in opposition to—their own cultures. They offer alternative understandings of societies dealing with modernism and cultural globalization. Their stories deal with emotional pain caused by the restrictions of local politics and economics and address common themes of incestuous love, sexual love, adulterous love, and utopian love. By analyzing their writing, Yao demonstrates that the concept of love as a social and political force can cross cultural boundaries and traditions to become a basis for human meaning, the key to a cosmopolitan vision.
The Fateful Conjunction of Love and Evil Cristaudo, Wayne
The European Legacy, Toward New Paradigms,
08/18/2022, Letnik:
27, Številka:
6
Journal Article, Book Review
To what extent are our most romantic moments determined by the portrayal of love in film and on TV? Is a walk on a moonlit beach a moment of perfect romance or simply a simulation of the familiar ...ideal seen again and again on billboards and movie screens? In her unique study of American love in the twentieth century, Eva Illouz unravels the mass of images that define our ideas of love and romance, revealing that the experience of "true" love is deeply embedded in the experience of consumer capitalism. Illouz studies how individual conceptions of love overlap with the world of clichés and images she calls the "Romantic Utopia." This utopia lives in the collective imagination of the nation and is built on images that unite amorous and economic activities in the rituals of dating, lovemaking, and marriage.
Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the purchase of beauty products, sports cars, diet drinks, and snack foods to success in love and happiness. Illouz reveals that, ultimately, every cliché of romance—from an intimate dinner to a dozen red roses—is constructed by advertising and media images that preach a democratic ethos of consumption: material goods and happiness are available to all.
Engaging and witty, Illouz's study begins with readings of ads, songs, films, and other public representations of romance and concludes with individual interviews in order to analyze the ways in which mass messages are internalized. Combining extensive historical research, interviews, and postmodern social theory, Illouz brings an impressive scholarship to her fascinating portrait of love in America.
La condition cosmique Raynal, Henri
La Revue du MAUSS semestrielle,
05/2020, Letnik:
55, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Les préoccupations écologiques ont entraîné une prise de conscience accrue des mérites éminents de notre planète. Toutefois, nous oublions que cette merveille est le fruit du Cosmos. Un puissant ...fondement philosophique est nécessaire à l’écologie : elle doit s’affranchir pour cela de l’acosmisme contemporain. Aimer la planète Terre, c’est aimer l’Univers qui l’a créée et où elle est insérée ; aimer les lois physiques qui sont partout les mêmes et partout actives, lois qui ont transformé par étapes la boule gazeuse initiale en ce jardin peuplé de créatures de toutes sortes, dont nous autres. L’histoire de l’Univers, depuis l’instant zéro, est un récit prodigieux. L’être humain a un besoin irrépressible de se référer à ce qui le dépasse et qu’il admire. Une cosmophilie , instruite par la science, s’impose.
In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very ...serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, European poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire. Romantic love was thus born as a movement of covert resistance. In The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, William M. Reddy illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent—or innocent enough. Reddy strikes out from this historical moment on an international exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal and Orissa, and in Heian Japan from 900-1200 CE, where one finds no trace of an opposition between love and desire. In this comparative framework, Reddy tells an appealing tale about the rise and fall of various practices of longing, underscoring the uniqueness of the European concept of sexual desire.
Computers have changed not just the way we work but the way we love. Falling in and out of love, flirting, cheating, even having sex online have all become part of the modern way of living and ...loving. Yet we know very little about these new types of relationship. How is an online affair where the two people involved may never see or meet each other different from an affair in the real world? Is online sex still cheating on your partner? Why do people tell complete strangers their most intimate secrets? What are the rules of engagement? Will online affairs change the monogamous nature of romantic relationships? These are just some of the questions Professor Aaron Ben Ze'ev, distinguished writer and academic, addresses in this 2004 book, a full-length study of love online. Accessible, shocking, entertaining, enlightening, this book will change the way you look at cyberspace and love forever.
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