In this Book
- Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic
- Book
- 2005
- Published by: State University of New York Press
- Series: SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture
summary
What is the matter with the women in Henry James? In The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and his short story “The Altar of the Dead,” one woman returns to a monster of a husband, another dies rather than confront the truth of her lover’s engagement, while yet another stakes her all on having a candle lit for a dead lover, only to promptly reject it. Exploring these strange choices, Sigi Jöttkandt argues that the singularity of these acts lies in their ethical nature, and that the ethical principle involved cannot be divorced from the question of aesthetics. She combines close readings of James with suggestive tours through Kantian aesthetics and set theory to uncover the aesthetic underpinning of the Lacanian ethical act, which has been largely overlooked in the current drive to discover a Cartesian origin for the subject as the subject of science.
Additional Information
ISBN
9780791482759
DOI
MARC Record
OCLC
63168679
Pages
196
Launched on MUSE
2012-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No