Love and its Critics - From the Song of Songs to Shakespeare and Milton's Eden

This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton's Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge.
Bryson and Movsesian argue that the poetry they explore celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin'amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the spirit, this love is a middle path. Alongside this tradition has grown a critical movement that employs a 'hermeneutics of suspicion', in Paul Ricoeur's phrase, to claim that passionate love poetry is not what it seems, and should be properly understood as worship of God, subordination to Empire, or an entanglement with the structures of language itself - in short, the very things it resists.
The book engages with some of the seminal literature of the Western canon, including the Bible, the poetry of Ovid, and works by English authors such as William Shakespeare and John Donne, and with criticism that stretches from the earliest readings of the Song of Songs to contemporary academic literature. Lively and enjoyable in its style, it attempts to restore a sense of pleasure to the reading of poetry, and to puncture critical insistence that literature must be outwitted.
It will be of value to professional, graduate, and advanced undergraduate scholars of literature, and to the educated general reader interested in treatments of love in poetry throughout history.

Summary

IN 2008, as he attempted to enter Canada to film a television series, Harry Hamlin-the former star of L.A. Law and once People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive-was detained at the border for unresolved narcotics convictions. And so begins Full Frontal Nudity, a laugh-out-loud-funny memoir in which Harry digs deep into his past to recount the wacky experiences of his childhood, the twisted path that led to his alleged criminal behavior, and the series of fortuitous mishaps that drove him to become an actor.

Harry was reared in suburban California in the late 1950s by a gin-gulping, pill-popping housewife mother and a rocket scientist father with a secret life. On its surface, his childhood was not unlike his peers', except that he was kicked out of the fourth grade for writing a book report on Mein Kampf and, when he was eleven, his parents gave him a subscription to Playboy for Christmas. Curious by nature, chock-full of boyish charm and good looks, Harry experimented with mystical religion and set off for Woodstock, only to narrowly avoid lighting the whole of Yellowstone National Park on fire. At eighteen, he was ready to matriculate at Berkeley and become the architect he always wanted to be. But fate-this time in the form of a large Hells Angel, a few purple microdots, and an evening in the tree houses of La Honda-got in the way.

Sharp and bawdy, Full Frontal Nudity spans the years from Harry's childhood through his time at Berkeley (which he was asked to leave after he was accused of running a brothel), to Yale, then on an extended vacation in the Yucatn, and finally to the American Conservatory Theater, where Harry played his first lead role-as the buck-naked star of Equus.


Full Frontal Nudity is an uproarious memoir that captures an era and describes the unlikely origins of a star.

Additional text

"Few actor memoirs are as plainly bonkers as L.A. Law star Harry Hamlin's.his stories are genuinely funny and entertaining-rare enough for an author, much less a celebrity memoir. Hamlin's good humor and sharp eye make Full Frontal Nudity a nicely unpredictable coming-of-age story."

--The Onion A.V. Club

Product details

• Authors: Michael Bryson, Arpi Movsesian
• Publisher: Open Book Publishers
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 10.07.2017
• EAN: 9781783743490
• ISBN: 978-1-78374-349-0
• No. of pages: 578
• Dimensions: 161 mm x 240 mm x 35 mm
• Weight: 1024 g
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > Classical linguistics / literary studies