'Desiderio in search of a master': desire and the quest for recognition

This essay examines the manner in which desire and Hegelian recognition intersect in Angela Carter’s 1972 novel, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. After providing a brief description of Hegel’s famous account of the interaction between the lord and the bondsman, the essay goes on to discuss the manner in which the novel invests the figure of the love-object with the potential to become an ideal master. The image of the reflecting eye, which recurs throughout Carter’s text, is then analyzed as an enactment of, and a commentary upon, the desiring gaze

A very British carnival: women, sex and transgression in Fiesta magazine

This article addresses the claim that pornography’s theme is ‘male power’ and the recent counter-claim that pornography may embody transgressive potential. It pursues the apparent contradictions in these claims by focussing on a specific pornographic text, the British downmarket softcore magazine, Fiesta, and locating it in relation to other forms of sexual and non-sexual representation. In considering the text’s relation to other ‘mass’ and ‘low’ texts, ‘bawdy’ and ‘carnivalesque’ sensibilities, it becomes possible to establish its particularly British and vulgar representation of sexuality which relies not only on its sexual content, but on a ‘dirty style’ in which notions of sexual propriety are self-consciously transgressed. The analysis of Fiesta plays particular attention to the role of women’s bodies and a mode of ‘dirty talk’ as key elements in its representation of sexuality which illuminate the rather abstract claims made about pornography’s structures of dominance and transgression.</p

From La Mettrie's voluptuous machine man to the perverse core of psychology

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709—1751) solved the problem of Cartesian dualism by denying the res cogitans any substance as such. He thus provided science with a basic paradigm which is still respected today. For La Mettrie, all aspects of the soul have to be considered as aspects of the res extensa: man is a machine. However, the emptying of the res cogito is not without a remainder. A zero level of subjectivity is left behind. This paper argues that it is through this remainder that modern subjectivity is structurally linked to the academic and, moreover, psychological gaze. It is further argued that the paradoxes of this modern stance are what prompt La Mettrie to put forward his voluptuous subject, his attempt to escape the abyss of the zero level of subjectivity. In this way, La Mettrie’s naturalized and scientific hedonism contains the germs of Marquis de Sade’s appropriation of the Enlightenment project. Hence this paper attempts to explore the extent to which La Mettrie’s L’homme machine, a key text in 18th-century materialism, has led to a perverse disposition in the modern psy-sciences

Time's Arrow New Music Ensemble, April 12, 2006

This is the concert program of the Time's Arrow performance on Wednesday, April 12, 2006 at 8:00 p.m., at the Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Avenue. Works performed were "Composer's Holiday" by Lukas Foss, "Three Poems of Sylvia Plath" by James Radford, "Short Suite for Piano" by Samuel Headrick, "Lament for John" by Richard Cornell, "East Wind" by Shulamit Ran, "Two Songs on Poems by Anne Fessenden, "Six Piano Pieces" by Richard Cornell, "Lament for Manos" bu Theodore Antoniou, "wind(ows)" by Ketty Nez, and "Comedia" by David Liptak. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Between Shadow and Rock: The Woman in Armenian American Literature

Periodically bolting out of the Boston apartment that keeps her safe in a world unmoved by her existence, clad in the heavy sweaters and thick wool socks that shield her barren spinsterhood, the Auntie of Hapet Kharibian\u27s Home in Exile also breaks out of the box that imprisons most portraits of Armenian American women.[1] As Auntie exerts her pittance of domestic authority by shopping for Ajax and picking green beans for an aged father\u27s stew, nurturing insanity through her idle days, the reader briefly glimpses a refreshing truthfulness behind the types and stereotypes that populate much Armenian American literature. Auntie\u27s life reflects a dual injustice: her silent reproaches to a dutiful nephew who visits weekly to shave his grandfather echo the equally inarticulate reproaches of numberless women unseen and unrecorded. Auntie reminds us that nowhere in Armenian American writing do we find a detailed and sustained portrait of a three-dimensional Armenian woman; indeed, in a literature that documents marginal experience -- both in the Old Country and in America -- the Armenian woman is exiled to its outer edges

On Not Being Porn: Intimacy and the Sexually Explicit Art Film

Since the mid-twentieth century, we have passed from a time where sexual frankness was actively obstructed by censorship and industry self-regulation to an age when pornography is circulated freely and is fairly ubiquitous on the Internet. Attitudes to sexually explicit material have accordingly changed a great deal in this time, but more at the level of the grounds on which it is objected to rather than through a general acceptance of it in the public sphere. Critical objections now tend to be political or aesthetic in nature rather than moralistic. Commercial cinema still seems wary of a frank exploration of sexuality, preferring to address it tangentially in genres such as the erotic thriller. In Europe, an art house canon of sexually explicit movies has formed, starting with Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) and the French-produced In the Realm of the Senses (1976). This article looks at the steps taken since the 1970s to challenge out-of-date taboos and yet at the same time differentiate the serious film about sex from both pornography (operating in parallel with mainstream cinema but in its shadow) and the exploitation film. After reviewing the art film’s relationship with both hard and soft core, two recent films, Intimacy (2000) and 9 Songs (2005), are analyzed for their explicit content and for the way they articulate their ideas about sex through graphic depictions of sexual acts. Compulsive and/or claustrophobic unsimulated sexual behaviour is used as a way of asking probing questions of intimacy (and its filmability). This is shown to be a very different thing from the highly visual and staged satisfactions of pornography