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

Love Stories: Narrative Discourses of Desire 1800 – the

Present Session Two


Agenda

• Recap

• Peter Brooks, ”Reading for the Plot”

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

• Romanticism and its adaptations


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.


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)



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



• Roland Barthes’ notion of codes:

• The proairetic code: the code of actions

• The hermeneutic code: the code of enigmas and answers


John Keats and Fanny Brawne


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)



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)


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)


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



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)



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


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

• Unification revisited: What happens to the knight?


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


John William Waterhouse


Frank Cadogan Cowper



Henri Gervex, Rolla (1878)


Adaptations

• Germaine Dulac (1920)

• Hidetoshi Oneda (2005)


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


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

Documents

Jens Kirk, Dept. of Languages and Culture Love Stories: Narrative Discourses of Desire 1800 – the Present Session Two