The Lover by Marguerite Duras and Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker are both transgressive novels and post modernist fiction. Both novels tell a story of a young girl in which is experimenting with her sexuality at a young age. In The Lover the narrator is in love with a man who is giving her money. Blood and Guts in High School is a fictional novel about the main character’s love for her father amongst other men. The goal of this essay is to explore the desires in which drive both of the young women’s sexual behavior that Duras and Acker express through their narrators. Desire can be defined as a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen. A desire can be expressed as a wish, can be longed for or something you feel. A sexual desire is a motivational state and an interest in sexual objects or activities. This includes a wish, need or drive to seek out sexual objects to engage in sexual activities. Sexual desire has been referred to by many different names such as sexual drive, motivation, interest or lust. Sexual desire may be the single most common sexual event in the lives of men and women. It is triggered by external and internal cues. Fantasies are also a part of sexual behavior, this includes what one may consider to be attractive. In Duras’ The Lover her narrator is a young but has intense sexual desire. Early on the main character also has a very strong sense of self confidence and self awareness. It is surprising for such a young girl, but as we learn she is much more curious than the average fifteen year old. She wants to be with an older man even if it is against what her family and others believe. Duras shows how females are portrayed as objects or sex symbols in t... ... middle of paper ... ...nd are very transgressive. In Duras’ The Lover we see the narrator’s desires drive her to be in a relationship with a man who is paying her. In Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, Janey’s desires make her fall in love with multiple men and subject herself to loneliness. Acker and Duras explore this through jouissance and plagiarism. Works Cited "Join Academia.edu & Share Your Research with the World." The Postcolonial in The Lover: Hybridity, and Power Exchange through Sexuality. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2014. Muth, Kathy. "Well After the End." Project MUSE. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2014 "Purloined Letters: The Scarlet Letter in Kathy Acker's Bloo." Critique 35.3 (1994): 173. ProQuest. Web. 16 Apr. 2014 Ruddy, Karen. "The Ambivalence of Colonial Desire in Marguerite Duras's "The Lover"" JSTOR. Palgrave Macmillan Journals, n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2014.
In the plays female sexuality is not expressed variously through courtship, pregnancy, childbearing, and remarriage, as it is in the period. Instead it is narrowly defined and contained by the conventions of Petrarchan love and cuckoldry. The first idealizes women as a catalyst to male virtue, insisting on their absolute purity. The second fears and mistrusts them for their (usually fantasized) infidelity, an infidelity that requires their actual or temporary elimination from the world of men, which then re-forms [sic] itself around the certainty of men’s shared victimization (Neely 127).
In this essay I will be exploring and contrasting the relationships of two characters. These characters are Stephen Wraysford of Sebastian Faulks' romantic yet graphically violent novel "Birdsong" and Victor Mancini of anarchic social commentator Chuck Palahniuk's "Choke." "Birdsong" darts between the early 1900s and the 1970s, although Stephen does not appear in the latter dates, and his story is accounted by his granddaughter Elizabeth. "Choke" is a contemporary novel, based in America in the late 20th/early 21st century. In both novels, there are strong messages about relationships, and how they can contribute to the development of a person. While both books may share similar messages, there are massive differences. The main point of contrast is the difference between lust and love.
Unsurprisingly, the novel is a classic coming of age story which centers on a young man who is confused about himself and his sexual identity in his early twenties. This confusion about himself and his sexual identity is the driving force of his interactions with his friends and lovers. Moreover, this confusion about himself and his sexual identity also facilitates the conflict and unforeseen consequences which occur during the novel.
Accordingly, I decided the purposes behind women 's resistance neither renamed sexual introduction parts nor overcame money related dependence. I recalled why their yearning for the trappings of progression could darken into a self-compelling consumerism. I evaluated how a conviction arrangement of feeling could end in sexual danger or a married woman 's troublesome twofold day. None of that, regardless, ought to cloud an era 's legacy. I comprehend prerequisites for a standard of female open work, another style of sexual expressiveness, the area of women into open space and political fights previously cornered by men all these pushed against ordinary restrictions even as they made new susceptibilities.
In the 1930s, who would have perpetrated violent acts against women in the name of sexual gratification yet still hold expectations that women take care of them? By making men in general the placeholder for “you” in the poem, it creates a much stronger and universal statement about the sexual inequality women face. She relates to women who have had “a god for [a] guest” yet it seems ironic because she is criticising the way these women have been treated (10). It could be argued, instead, that it is not that she sees men as gods, but that it is the way they see themselves. Zeus was a god who ruled Olympus and felt entitled to any woman he wanted, immortal or otherwise.
Updike, John “A&P.” Exploring Literature: Writing and Arguing About Fiction, Poetry, Drama and The Essay.4th e. Ed. Frank Madden. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. 496-501. Print.
Love and hate are powerful and contradicting emotions. Love and hate are also the subjects under examination for several centuries yet even to the present day; it remains to be a mystery. For the past centuries, writers and poets have written about love showing that the stories of love can never fade way. For this essay, I will discuss three English literature sources that talk about the theme of love and hate. These are the poem Olds "Sex without Love”, the poem Kennel "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps and the story by Hemingway "Hills like White Elephants. I will use the poems to compare the traditional stance of sex that are within the parameters of marriage and love versus the belief that love is in itself an act of pleasure
Essential yet underplayed, seduction is a means to establishing a physical union. Throughout literature the basic arts of seduction, chasing the opposite sex, have changed, but a reader of such literature can see that the motive of seduction has mostly remained the same. The metaphysical literary motive of seduction in the context of this paper is a delicate technique of intentionally tempting a person to participate in a physical union or exploitation, or to inspire or persuade a person to partake in sexual behaviors. Although the outcome of these seduction techniques are sexual, literary authors have their own ways of writing these complex ideas in a colloquial language. As time progressed, debates over the literary means of seduction has
...hes to achieve. Confidence and desire are the two main feelings that initiate sexual desire and action, and can be applied to other areas in life.
The poets integrated ?metaphysical conceits? as focal parts of these poems. Along with these, they used effective language as a basis for their convincing arguments, they included subjects of periodical importance (e.g. ?courtship? and ?religion?), and use very clever structures that are manipulated in order to make the poem read in the desired way. The very clear indication of the theme in question was strongly aided by the way in which the personas portrayed the emotions they felt and the way they showed their attitudes towards the subject. Considering all these factors, the poets made critical arguments to the mistresses in order to alter their views, thus changing their minds, on denying the poets the sex that they desired so strongly.
My eyes were caught by the title "rape fantasy" at the first time I saw this essay because it was so sensitive that most people are not willing to talk about it. After finish reading this novel, Estelle and her six fantasies gave me deep impression.
In Literature and Life, Love is a powerful force. Sans love; feelings, desires and relationships may seem empty. This force however, can also be destructive, even may end a marriage. Marital discord, arising in general, due to infatuation, lust or affection for a third person, may crop up primarily facilitated by adverse familial, economic or societal conditions that do frequently find their mention in the written word. Some of these concerns like family, marriage, sexuality, society and death, are notably illustrated by the authors, Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary and Laura Esquivel in Like Water for Chocolate.
During the Seventeenth Century, eroticism in literature was deemed outrageous and was rarely published or performed. However, a group of male poets often gathered to share their writings between one another. This group comprised of a number of renowned poets that we celebrate today including Jon Donne, Ben Jonson and Thomas Carew. Carew’s poetry is notoriously erotic, far beyond the norm of his era. Carew’s most noted erotic poem A Rapture deals with the courtship of his desire, Celia. Embedded in A Rapture are underlying meanings, mainly dealing with obsessive desire and power. Thomas Carew’s poetry encompasses both Petrarchan and Ovidian discourses of desire, more specifically the obsessive male desire and the attainment of power.
In this essay I would like to emphasize different ideas of how love is understood and discussed in literature. This topic has been immortal. One can notice that throughout the whole history writers have always been returning to this subject no matter what century people lived in or what their nationality was.
The role sexuality plays on relationships is a key component in how men and women think. For women, the definition of sexual desire is to be emotionally intimate and to express love. Men on the other hand view sexual desire as physical pleasure and sexual intercourse. These two definitions are very different from one another and can lead to many disputes on what sexual desire actually means. Those definitions also play into the sexual fantasies of men and women. Women tend to have sexual fantasies that involve a familiar person that has affection and commitment. Men's sexual fantasies have strangers, or multiple people in them and the fantasy focuses on the sexual acts. So to sum it up, women want to have intimacy and commitment, while men want the exact opposite.