Erósz és Agapé: Erotextus Edward Prime-Stevenson Imre című regényének expozíciójában
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Tartalom: https://ojs3.mtak.hu/index.php/literatura/article/view/2039
Archívum: Literatura
Gyűjtemény: Tanulmány
Cím:
Erósz és Agapé: Erotextus Edward Prime-Stevenson Imre című regényének expozíciójában
Létrehozó:
Zsolt, Bojti
Kiadó:
BTK Irodalomtudományi Intézet, Eötvös Loránd Kutatási Hálózat
Dátum:
2019-11-18
Tartalmi leírás:
Zsolt BojtiEros and AgapeErotext in the Exposition of Imre: A Memorandum by Edward Prime-Stevenson Fin-de-siècle gay literature in English operated with a double narrative: one narrativeoffers a historical (and ‘innocent’) reading available to general readership; the other offers a personal (often illicit) reading available to the susceptible and initiatedreaders only. The double narrative, thus, allowed authors to give subtle visibility to same-sex desire in their works that would evade censorship. This paper arguesthat there is a similar double narrative in the exposition of Imre: A Memorandum by American music critic and émigré writer Edward Prime-Stevenson. The doublenarrative of the novel, however, differs from that of prior gay literature. I argue that Prime-Stevenson thought it was a literary sin that prior gay literature offered a sensual,erotic, or even pornographic, subversive secondary reading to susceptible readers. In my reading, Prime-Stevenson consciously planted cues in the openingof the novel, thus, created an erotext to trigger a similarly subversive and illicit reading of his text. However, Prime-Stevenson used this technique to demonstrate thatpurely erotic literary representations denigrate same-sex desire; therefore, in what followed, he presented a different, agapeic view on same-sex desire. The paper substantiatesthat Prime-Stevenson’s intention was to break away from earlier narrative ‘traditions’ of gay literature to offer a naturalised and legitimised representation and ‘script’ of ‘homosexuality’ per se. Prime-Stevenson did so in a crucial period of time, as the term ‘homosexual’ just barely entered the English language and its pejorativeconnotations may not have been set in stone. The paper, as a result, casts a new complexion on sexuality as a literary phenomenon and the relevance of thenarrative technique in the exposition of Imre, which plays a crucial role in Prime-Stevenson composing one of the very first openly homosexual novels in English, whichhave a happy ending.
Nyelv:
magyar
Típus:
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Formátum:
application/pdf
Azonosító:
Forrás:
Literatura; Évf. 45 szám 2 (2019); 141–151.
2786-1074
0133-2368
Kapcsolat:
Létrehozó:
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