Love Stories: The Discourses of Desire in Literature and Culture, 1800 the Present

1
Love Stories The Discourses of Desire in
Literature and Culture, 1800 the Present

• Session Two

2
Agenda

• Summary of Session One
• How to theorise desire Catherine Belsey
• Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott

3
A Summary of Session One

• From the Tristan and Isolde promotion web page
  we saw that
• Love is transgression
• Love is sadness
• Love is simulation, a copy of a copy, cliché,
  hyperreal, quotation, citatation

4
Cultural Studies Assignment

• Hyperreal love in Tristan and Isolde With Special
  Reference to the Film Website.
• Taking your point of departure in an outline of
  Baudrillards notions of simulation and the
  simulacrum, you analyse and discuss how the
  website both claims that Tristan and Isolde is a
  representation of love and undermines that claim
  by hinting that were really dealing with a copy
  of a copy.

5
A Summary of Session One

• From Keats we saw that
• Love is the love of love happy love is aching
  separation, longing for unification
• Love (as unification) is loss of identity, self,
  consciousness, a kind of death

6
Literary Project

• Love, Identity, and Reading in Keats La Belle
  Dame Sans Merci, The Eve of St. Agnes, and
  Lamia.

7
Theorising Desire According to Catherine
Belsey. Reading Love Stories

• Two key assumptions of romance
• Human beings are divided into mind and body
• Human beings are incomplete until united with
  their soul mates

8
Theorising Desire According to Catherine
Belsey. Reading Love Stories (cont.)

• In romances true love offers to unify mind and
  body (23)
• However, romances celebrate the elemental
  otherness of desire as a constituent of true
  love (28) in metaphors of the destruction of
  subjectivity remember Keats!
• True love, then, is not so much a union of mind
  and body as an alternation of their dominance
  (30)

9
Theorising Desire According to Catherine
Belsey. Reading Love Stories (cont.)

• But, in fact, neither mind nor body is the
  dominant one. Both are social and cultural
  constructs (34). Moreover, desire is an effect of
  the signifier. Differance. difference and
  deferral
• Perhaps this is why we need so many love stories
  they never actually fulfil their promise of
  uniting mind and body and lover and beloved.
• Still, fulfilment rather than disappointment is
  an important aspect of romance. The happiness of
  reading springs from the process rather than the
  end.
• Tragic love. Love is related to loss. The end of
  reading is always the end of desire.

10
Belsey, Adultery in King Arthurs Court

• Arthur, Guinevere, LAncelot, Elaine, Mark,
  Tristam, Iseult, etc.
• Stories of adultery and homosocial desire
  triangular desire - rivalry

11
Belsey, Adultery in King Arthurs Court

• The literary and cultural history of Arthurian
  legend
• I the 12th Century romance. Love is passionate,
  extravagant, agonizing, and obsessional (108).
  Love is not related to marriage and family
• II. The 15th Century romance. Adultery is
  tolerated.
• III. 19th century romance. Adultery in conflict
  with moral and spiritual (religious) duty

12
Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott

• Why a poem about the Lady of Shalott?
• What does Camelot signify?
• Whats the Ladys situation like? Outline the
  changes.
• Whats the theme of the poem?

13
Paintings of The Lady of Shalott

• John William Waterhouse (1849-1917)

14
John William Waterhouse 1888
15
John William Waterhouse, 1894
16
John William Waterhouse, 1916I Am Half Sick of
Shadows, Said The Lady of Shalott
17
William Holman Hunt
18
John Sidney Meteyard
19
Arthur Huges
20
William More Egley
21
John Atkinson Grimshaw