jens kirk, dept. of languages and culture love stories: narrative discourses of desire 1800 – the...

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Love Stories: Narrative Discourses of Desire 1800 – the

Present Session Two

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Agenda

• Recap

• Peter Brooks, ”Reading for the Plot”

• Loving, Telling, and Reading with Special Reference to John Keats

• Romanticism and its adaptations

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Recap

• Brooks: Desire propels narrative• Bersani: Narrative contains desire• Happy love has no history: love stories concern

that which threatens or prevents love• Desire is triangular: love stories concern

relationships between lover, beloved and an antagonist

• Desire is intertextual: love stories concern love as simulation, copy, quotation.

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Peter Brooks, ”Reading for the Plot”

• Narrative’s omnipresence as a basic sense making activity (4)

• ”Plot is the principle of interconnectedness and intention…” (5)

• ”…the logic of narrative discourse, the organizing dynamic of a specific mode of human understanding.” (7)

• ”Plot … is the logic and dynamic of narrative, and narrative itself a form of understanding and explanation.” (10)

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Peter Brooks, ”Reading for the Plot”

• Terminology:– Fabula – sjuzet– Histoire – recit– Story – plot– Events – story– Story – plot – discourse

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Peter Brooks, ”Reading for the Plot”

• Roland Barthes’ notion of codes:

• The proairetic code: the code of actions

• The hermeneutic code: the code of enigmas and answers

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

John Keats and Fanny Brawne

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Loving, Telling, and Reading with Special Reference to John Keats’ ”To Fanny

Brawne””You cannot conceive how I ache to be with

you: how I would die for one hour – for what is in the world? I say you cannot conceive; it is impossible you should look with such eyes upon me as I have upon you: it cannot be” (NE2: 952)

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Loving, Telling, and Reading with Special Reference to John Keats’ ”To Fanny

Brawne”• Love = the lover’s desire for unity with his

beloved and the lover’s knowledge that unity is impossible

• A lack of reciprocity

• Lover not a worthy love object: ”I cannot be admired, I am not a thing to be admired” (953)

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Loving, Telling, and Reading with Special Reference to John Keats’ ”To

Fanny Brawne”• ”I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray,

pray, pray to your star like a Hethen” (953)

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Loving, Telling, and Reading with Special Reference to John Keats’ ”To

Fanny Brawne”• ”I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray,

pray, pray to your star like a Hethen” (953)

• Love creates its own obstacles: Venus

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Loving, Telling, and Reading with Special Reference to John Keats’ ”To Fanny

Brawne””I have two luxuries to brood over in my

walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute” (NE2: 953)

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Loving, Telling, and Reading with Special Reference to John Keats’ ”To Fanny

Brawne””I have two luxuries to brood over in my

walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute” (NE2: 953)

The end of love (consumation, unity) is the death of love

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Loving with Special Reference to John Keats’ ”La Belle Dame Sans Merci”

• Unification revisited: What happens to the knight?

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Loving, Telling, and Reading with Special Reference to John Keats’ ”La Belle Dame

Sans Merci”• The frame story: the knight and his

interlocutor

• The framed story: the knight and the lady

• The poem and its reader: the frame structure; the literary ballad

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

John William Waterhouse

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Frank Cadogan Cowper

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Henri Gervex, Rolla (1878)

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Adaptations

• Germaine Dulac (1920)

• Hidetoshi Oneda (2005)

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Introduction: the Aims and Purposes of the Seminar

• 1st and 2nd semesters: the analysis and history of texts

• 3rd and 4th semesters: literary theory and methodology

• 4th semester: seminars

• 4th semester: literary and media studies project

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture

Introduction: the Aims and Purposes of the Seminar

• Texts – the analysis, history, and theory of a ”genre” – the love story – across the media and genres, but focussing on narrative and writing

• Culture(s) – the idea of love across cultural and historical periods: Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism, Postmodernism