Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative
Language: English
Published by Harvard University Press, 1993
- Hardcover
- Used

Seller: Phatpocket Limited, Waltham Abbey, HERTS, United KingdomPhatpocket Limited
AbeBooks seller since April 28, 2005
Condition: Used - Fair
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Seller Inventory # Z1-C-001-02446
- Title
- Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative
- Author
- Brooks, Peter
- Publisher
- Harvard University Press
- Publication year
- 1993
- Condition
- Acceptable
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0674077245
- ISBN 13
- 9780674077249
The desire to know the body is a powerful dynamic of storytelling in all its forms. Peter Brooks argues that modern narrative is intent on uncovering the body in order to expose a truth that must be written in the flesh. In a book that ranges widely through literature and painting, Brooks shows how the imagination strives to bring the body into language and to write stories on the body.
From Rousseau, Balzac, Mary Shelley, and Flaubert, to George Eliot, Zola, Henry James, and Marguerite Duras, from Manet and Gauguin to Mapplethorpe, writers and artists have returned in fascination to the body, the inescapable other of the spirit. Brooks's deep understanding of psychoanalysis informs his demonstration of how the "epistemophilic urge"--the desire to know-guides fictional plots and our reading of them.
It is the sexual body that furnishes the building blocks of symbolization, eventually of language itself-which then takes us away from the body. Yet mind and language need to recover the body, as an other realm that is primary to their very definition. Brooks shows how and why the female body has become the field upon which the aspirations, anxieties, and contradictions of a whole society are played out. And he suggests how writers and artists have found in the woman's body the dynamic principle of their storytelling, its motor force.
This major book entertains and teaches: Brooks presumes no special knowledge on the part of his readers. His account proceeds chronologically from Rousseau in the eighteenth century forward to contemporary artists and writers. Body Work gives us a set of analytical tools and ideas-primarily from psychoanalysis, narrative and film studies, and feminist theory-that enable us to read modern narrative afresh.
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Phatpocket Limited
Waltham Abbey, HERTS, United Kingdom
AbeBooks seller since April 28, 2005
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Phatpocket Limited is a world class secondhand bookstore located in the Hertfordshire countryside in the United Kingdom. We specialize in textbooks across an enormous variety of subjects. We aim to provide a low cost source of high quality textbooks to the academic community. We also have a sizable collection of rare and collectible books. We are dedicated to providing our customers with the highest standard of customer service in the bookselling business.Phatpocket Limited is registered in England and Wales: No. 04924751.…
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