Papers by M James Mortlock
Apocalypse, Utopia & Dystopia: The Utopian politics of race and gender in Dawn and Herland, 2017
Apocalypse, Utopia & Dystopia:
The Utopian politics of race and gender in Dawn and Herland
The School of 'Fleshly Poetry', 2018
For shame! – write cleanly, Labeo, or write none.
Hall’s Satires, Book II, x.
Belial Came last, ... more For shame! – write cleanly, Labeo, or write none.
Hall’s Satires, Book II, x.
Belial Came last, than whom a spirit more lewd
Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love
Vice for itself.
Milton, Paradise Lost
‘The main charge I bring against poetry of this kind is its sickliness and effeminacy”.
The Uncanny Aspects of the Life and Works of Emily Brontë, 2018
As Milan Kundera notes, ‘[t]he idea of eternal return is a mysterious one’. Indeed, Nietzsche pra... more As Milan Kundera notes, ‘[t]he idea of eternal return is a mysterious one’. Indeed, Nietzsche practically delighted in torturing his fellow philosophers with this very supposition: ‘to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!’
For the longest time, I puzzled over the meaning of this statement, and the same sentence by Roland Barthes kept uncannily surfacing and resurfacing in my mind, ‘to repeat excessively is to enter into loss.’
The joy of the eternal return must always be balanced with the tempering supposition of eternal loss.
It is upon this premise that I intend to apply to the works of Emily Brontë, both her windswept masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, and a selection of her poetry – both Gondal and non-Gondal pieces. Avoiding any heavy biography/hagiography, or clinicising/diagnosing Emily, I intend to explore how Freud's Theory of the Uncanny permeates through both Emily's body of work and further into her life itself.
'The Architecture of Hysteria'; The Male Hysteric in Victorian Society and Literature , 2017
The Architecture of Hysteria
Hysteria has taken many odd, and at times even bizarre turnings in ... more The Architecture of Hysteria
Hysteria has taken many odd, and at times even bizarre turnings in its protracted career, but one of the most perplexing chapters in this already drawn-out history is the mutually opposed and inconsistent variance between the ‘established’ female hysteric and that of the hysterical male. The marriage of hysteria and feminism has long been the fascination among female intellectuals, literary critics and artists with what Mary Kelly calls ‘the continuing romance of hysteria.’ This reclamation of hysteria in the name of feminism is a highly important turn in the history of disorder, discourse theory and semiotics: but could hysteria also be the son’s disease? I intend to draw particular focus on how hysteria in men has always been held in special kind of contempt as a shameful and ‘effeminate’ disorder, and almost always equated with latent homosexuality. Though male hysteria has been recorded as far back as its feminine counterpart in the seventeenth-century, ‘many feminist critics have ignored its sociological and clinical manifestations, […] as though “hysterical questions” about sexual identity are only women’s questions’ , and are exempt from the wider study of gender in historical and current sexual difference and identity.
In his case studies of male hysteria, Emile Batault observed that hysterical men were thought to be ‘timid and fearful men … Coquettish and eccentric, they prefer ribbons and scarves to hard manual labour.’ Furthering this subversive account into the current day Carroll Smith-Rosenburg comments in a footnote that the male hysteric does not undermine her theories on feminine hysteria as ‘to this day hysteria is still believed to be a principally female “disease” of behavioural pattern.’ And that the male hysteric is ‘different’ – homosexual or working class. She concludes a rather cyclic argument by confirming that male hysteria is due simply to ‘a degree of female identification among men who assumed a hysterical role.’ Male hysteria then is simply a subset of female hysteria and mimics its motives and behaviours.
Exploring how the themes of liminality and hybridity resonate within two key post-colonial texts.
Uploads
Papers by M James Mortlock
Hall’s Satires, Book II, x.
Belial Came last, than whom a spirit more lewd
Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love
Vice for itself.
Milton, Paradise Lost
‘The main charge I bring against poetry of this kind is its sickliness and effeminacy”.
For the longest time, I puzzled over the meaning of this statement, and the same sentence by Roland Barthes kept uncannily surfacing and resurfacing in my mind, ‘to repeat excessively is to enter into loss.’
The joy of the eternal return must always be balanced with the tempering supposition of eternal loss.
It is upon this premise that I intend to apply to the works of Emily Brontë, both her windswept masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, and a selection of her poetry – both Gondal and non-Gondal pieces. Avoiding any heavy biography/hagiography, or clinicising/diagnosing Emily, I intend to explore how Freud's Theory of the Uncanny permeates through both Emily's body of work and further into her life itself.
Hysteria has taken many odd, and at times even bizarre turnings in its protracted career, but one of the most perplexing chapters in this already drawn-out history is the mutually opposed and inconsistent variance between the ‘established’ female hysteric and that of the hysterical male. The marriage of hysteria and feminism has long been the fascination among female intellectuals, literary critics and artists with what Mary Kelly calls ‘the continuing romance of hysteria.’ This reclamation of hysteria in the name of feminism is a highly important turn in the history of disorder, discourse theory and semiotics: but could hysteria also be the son’s disease? I intend to draw particular focus on how hysteria in men has always been held in special kind of contempt as a shameful and ‘effeminate’ disorder, and almost always equated with latent homosexuality. Though male hysteria has been recorded as far back as its feminine counterpart in the seventeenth-century, ‘many feminist critics have ignored its sociological and clinical manifestations, […] as though “hysterical questions” about sexual identity are only women’s questions’ , and are exempt from the wider study of gender in historical and current sexual difference and identity.
In his case studies of male hysteria, Emile Batault observed that hysterical men were thought to be ‘timid and fearful men … Coquettish and eccentric, they prefer ribbons and scarves to hard manual labour.’ Furthering this subversive account into the current day Carroll Smith-Rosenburg comments in a footnote that the male hysteric does not undermine her theories on feminine hysteria as ‘to this day hysteria is still believed to be a principally female “disease” of behavioural pattern.’ And that the male hysteric is ‘different’ – homosexual or working class. She concludes a rather cyclic argument by confirming that male hysteria is due simply to ‘a degree of female identification among men who assumed a hysterical role.’ Male hysteria then is simply a subset of female hysteria and mimics its motives and behaviours.
Hall’s Satires, Book II, x.
Belial Came last, than whom a spirit more lewd
Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love
Vice for itself.
Milton, Paradise Lost
‘The main charge I bring against poetry of this kind is its sickliness and effeminacy”.
For the longest time, I puzzled over the meaning of this statement, and the same sentence by Roland Barthes kept uncannily surfacing and resurfacing in my mind, ‘to repeat excessively is to enter into loss.’
The joy of the eternal return must always be balanced with the tempering supposition of eternal loss.
It is upon this premise that I intend to apply to the works of Emily Brontë, both her windswept masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, and a selection of her poetry – both Gondal and non-Gondal pieces. Avoiding any heavy biography/hagiography, or clinicising/diagnosing Emily, I intend to explore how Freud's Theory of the Uncanny permeates through both Emily's body of work and further into her life itself.
Hysteria has taken many odd, and at times even bizarre turnings in its protracted career, but one of the most perplexing chapters in this already drawn-out history is the mutually opposed and inconsistent variance between the ‘established’ female hysteric and that of the hysterical male. The marriage of hysteria and feminism has long been the fascination among female intellectuals, literary critics and artists with what Mary Kelly calls ‘the continuing romance of hysteria.’ This reclamation of hysteria in the name of feminism is a highly important turn in the history of disorder, discourse theory and semiotics: but could hysteria also be the son’s disease? I intend to draw particular focus on how hysteria in men has always been held in special kind of contempt as a shameful and ‘effeminate’ disorder, and almost always equated with latent homosexuality. Though male hysteria has been recorded as far back as its feminine counterpart in the seventeenth-century, ‘many feminist critics have ignored its sociological and clinical manifestations, […] as though “hysterical questions” about sexual identity are only women’s questions’ , and are exempt from the wider study of gender in historical and current sexual difference and identity.
In his case studies of male hysteria, Emile Batault observed that hysterical men were thought to be ‘timid and fearful men … Coquettish and eccentric, they prefer ribbons and scarves to hard manual labour.’ Furthering this subversive account into the current day Carroll Smith-Rosenburg comments in a footnote that the male hysteric does not undermine her theories on feminine hysteria as ‘to this day hysteria is still believed to be a principally female “disease” of behavioural pattern.’ And that the male hysteric is ‘different’ – homosexual or working class. She concludes a rather cyclic argument by confirming that male hysteria is due simply to ‘a degree of female identification among men who assumed a hysterical role.’ Male hysteria then is simply a subset of female hysteria and mimics its motives and behaviours.