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This essay revisits James Baldwin's celebrated, albeit controversial, criticism of Richard Wright's Native Son. Offering a close reading of Baldwin's "the great space" (a figure that combines sex, race, castration, and violence, and other forms of aberrant "protest"), the essay argues that this figure of displacement immediately displaces its own inability to name what constitutes this displacement. What I name "blacksexe" emerges here as the symptom of that displacement, the detail of which can also be seen in Eldridge Cleaver's infamous critique of Baldwin: his writing, his sexuality, and his (white-identified) notion of masochism. The essay concludes with a series of observations on how blackness can never be separated from the "real" of castration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), male protagonist John Thornton, a supposed master of industry, is truly industry's victimized object. Critics have covered the Victorian drive for noble self-sacrifice, particularly in female characters, but this article claims that Gaskell critiques a masochistic work ethic that arises out of the mixture of industrialism with Protestantism and produces a bourgeois masculinity so masochistic it is nearly suicidal. Gaskell's novel unmasks this deceptively simple system of "self-denial," which promises working men reciprocity for their deferred pleasure but fails to deliver. Denial of the body to perfect the soul is a system that works well enough for the rich, Gaskell shows, since the rich body is neither starving nor healthily reproductive. Self-denial, then, becomes a position of privilege rather than of self-improvement. Ultimately, Gaskell rejects the unfeeling masochism of this industrial code of masculinity in favor of the pains of love and vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates the application of dominant institutional discourses, such as psychoanalysis, in the interpretation of literary fiction. I take up the case of Jean Rhys and her 1929 novel Quartet. Both author and novel have been analyzed through the concept of masochism, as creating masochistic characters or a masochistic aesthetic. But what do we mean when we classify or "diagnose" authors of literature or fictional characters as in the case of Rhys' and Quartet's protagonist? Against this mode of reading, I argue that Rhys' novel asks us, in various ways, to understand it on its own terms, suggesting a mode that I call immanent reading. It enjoins the reader to understand rather than to classify the famously problematic Rhys "heroine." Ultimately, Quartet foregrounds the instability of moral and social positions, implicitly arguing against what it calls the "mania for classification" employed by the novel's antagonists. Quartet cautions against diagnostic interpretations by dramatizing scenes of hypothetical focalization, emphasizing the modal nature of reality, and providing the novel with its characteristically shadowy mood. Mood is a term drawn from Gérard Genette, which describes how certain narrative choices and devices (or mode) compose a discursive narrative atmosphere (or mood). This project suggests the untapped potential of narratology for analyzing affect in fictional narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the unfinished work "Christabel," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is presented. It outlines the characters and explores the significance of these characters. It examines the fecund demonstration of suggesting masochism in poetic form through enjambment as the form deflect the demands of content. An overview of the story is also given.

This essay contends that historicizing ideas about violence is the key to future theory and therapy. It reveals the extent to which idea citizens and therapists hold about suffering and violence. It examines the production of moral and social consciousness in American postwar period particularly the 2 decades after the Second World War. It notes the necessity of reformulating intertwined concepts of shame and masochism within psychoanalysis.

An essay is presented which explores how German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann's fantasy story "Nutracker and Mouse King" and the famous ballet adaptation thematize the comingled desire and rage felt by adult male artists who depend on female children. Hoffmann stresses a solution to the problem of lifeless performance in the creations of adult puppetmasters in the said story. The ballet adaptation downplayed the erotic and masochistic elements in favor of a focus on female dreams and development.

Abstract:This paper uses a range of early (100-400 C.E.) martyrological narratives, in association with novels and apocalyptic discourses of the same era, to show the appeal of such narratives to early Christian audiences' prurience into sadoerotic violence. The sado-erotic voyeurism invited can be placed in historical and performative continuity with the Roman spectacle, literary ambivalence over female chastity, and both geographical and heresiographical fantasies about the sexual and cultural predilections of the Other. The spectacle of sado-erotic violence allows the enjoyment of erotic display at the same time as the disavowal of that enjoyment, which is projected onto the violently punitive actions of Roman authorities, heathen mobs, or (in eschatology) angels of hell. It also allows masochistic identification with victims' eroticized brutalization and dissolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a look at the politics of masochism in Lady Mary Wroth's 1621 writing "The Countess of Montgomery's Urania." Mary Wroth has attracted decades of feminist scholarship. She is the first English woman to publish and original prose romance and sonnet sequence, and also the first woman to have written a pastoral tragicomedy.

Presents an interpretation of gender dynamics in the novel 'Misery,' by Stephen King. Masochism in King's novel; Plot of the novel; Information on how male masochism of the novel contains within it a wish-fulfillment fantasy of sadistic male triumph; Comparison of the ending of King's novel with the motion picture 'The Beguiled,' directed by Don Siegel.

Examines the theoretical masochism of France's feminist writer Luce Irigaray. Inventive metaphorization of the female body politic; Characteristics of Irigaray's neologism.

Focuses on Jewish masochism as exhibited in couvade rituals and castration. Couvade as rituals wherein the husband of a woman in labor acts out childbirth; Male anxiety and envy of the female body; Masochism in men as an acting out of male envy and desire for femaleness.

Abstract:As the most important and sustained cyborg narrative in Hollywood film, the Terminator films, particularly the first two, continue to demand a considerable amount of critical scrutiny. When the highly charged allegorical power of the figure of the cyborg is added to Arnold Schwarzenegger's star persona, now evolved into that of national political figure, this persona emerges as a welter of gendered, sexual, and racial anxieties that relate in multivalent ways. In his famous essay "Is the Rectum a Grave?" Leo Bersani argues that the "logic of homosexual desire includes the potential for a loving identification with the gay man's enemies." This essay argues that films like Terminator 2 enact the queer theory debates indexed in Bersani's essay, revealing the complicity with normative standards of gendered identity in queer desire, but also exposing the queer nature of these normative standards. The film forces us to acknowledge that while queer desire may be troublingly complicit in the structures of normative power that pathologize it, those very same structures proceed from an oddly analogous fascination with the homoerotics of power, especially in its most virulent, which is to say, its fascist, form. Terminator 2 cloaks its sadomasochistic fascist fantasies in the guise of the violent, melodramatic family film. The film is exemplary of the "Bush to Bush" era-from 1989 to 2008, the period presided over by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. Terminator 2 illuminates the split between narcissistic and masochistic modes of male sexuality that informs the period's representational practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]