Textual Intimacy

Textual Intimacy
Author: Wesley A. Kort
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2012-05-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0813932785

Given its affinity with questions of identity, autobiography offers a way into the interior space between author and reader, especially when writers define themselves in terms of religion. In his exploration of this "textual intimacy," Wesley Kort begins with a theorization of what it means to say who one is and how one's self-account as a religious person stands in relation to other forms of self-identification. He then provides a critical analysis of autobiographical texts by nine contemporary American writers—including Maya Angelou, Philip Roth, and Anne Lamott—who give religion a positive place in their accounts of who they are. Finally, in disclosing his own religious identity, Kort concludes with a meditation on several meanings of the word assumption.

Textual Intimacy

Textual Intimacy
Author: Wesley A. Kort
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2012
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0813932769

Given its affinity with questions of identity, autobiography offers a way into the interior space between author and reader, especially when writers define themselves in terms of religion. In his exploration of this "textual intimacy," Wesley Kort begins with a theorization of what it means to say who one is and how one's self-account as a religious person stands in relation to other forms of self-identification. He then provides a critical analysis of autobiographical texts by nine contemporary American writers--including Maya Angelou, Philip Roth, and Anne Lamott--who give religion a positive place in their accounts of who they are. Finally, in disclosing his own religious identity, Kort concludes with a meditation on several meanings of the word assumption.

Intimate Reading

Intimate Reading
Author: Jessica Barr
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2020-04-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472131699

Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women’s Visions and Vitae explores the ways that women mystics sought to make their books into vehicles for the reader’s spiritual transformation. Jessica Barr argues that the cognitive work of reading these texts was meant to stimulate intensely personal responses, and that the very materiality of the book can produce an intimate encounter with God. She thus explores the differences between mystics’ biographies and their self-presentation, analyzing as well the complex rhetorical moves that medieval women writers employ to render their accounts more effective. This new volume is structured around five case studies. Chapters consider the biographies of 13th-century holy women from Liège, the writings of Margery Kempe, Gertrude of Helfta, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich. At the heart of Intimate Reading is the question of how reading works—what it means to enter imaginatively and intellectually into the words of another. The volume showcases the complexity of medieval understandings of the work of reading, deepening our perception of the written word’s capacity to signify something that lies even beyond rational comprehension.

Policing Intimacy

Policing Intimacy
Author: Jenna Grace Sciuto
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2021-04-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496833465

In Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, author Jenna Grace Sciuto analyzes literary depictions of sexual policing of the color line across multiple spaces with diverse colonial histories: Mississippi through William Faulkner’s work, Louisiana through Ernest Gaines’s novels, Haiti through the work of Marie Chauvet and Edwidge Danticat, and the Dominican Republic through writing by Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario. This literature exposes the continuing coloniality that links depictions of US democracy with Caribbean dictatorships in the twentieth century, revealing a set of interrelated features characterizing the transformation of colonial forms of racial and sexual control into neocolonial reconfigurations. A result of systemic inequality and large-scale historical events, the patterns explored herein reveal the ways in which private relations can reflect national occurrences and the intimate can be brought under public scrutiny. Acknowledging the widespread effects of racial and sexual policing that persist in current legal, economic, and political infrastructures across the circum-Caribbean can in turn bring to light permutations of resistance to the violent discriminations of the status quo. By drawing on colonial documents, such as early law systems like the 1685 French Code Noir instated in Haiti, the 1724 Code Noir in Louisiana, and the 1865 Black Code in Mississippi, in tandem with examples from twentieth-century literature, Policing Intimacy humanizes the effects of legal histories and leaves space for local particularities. By focusing on literary texts and variances in form and aesthetics, Sciuto demonstrates the necessity of incorporating multiple stories, histories, and traumas into accounts of the past.

Intimacy and Desire

Intimacy and Desire
Author: Dr David Schnarch
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2010
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1921640324

In this groundbreaking book, Dr. David Schnarch, one of the foremost experts on sexuality and relationships, explains why normal healthy couples in long-term relationships have sexual desire problems, regardless of how much they love each other or how well they communicate. In-depth examples of couples he has counselled reveal his unique understanding of common-but-difficult sexual desire problems that affect couples of all ages. Combining compassion and clinical wisdom, Dr. Schnarch explains how to use his revolutionary Four Points of Balance approach to resolve low desire, mismatched desire, sexual boredom, and the emotional gridlock that accompanies these problems. Intimacy and Desire provides a roadmap for how couples can transform common sexual desire problems into self-exploration and personal development that leads to psychological and spiritual growth, stronger relationships, and more powerful and meaningful desire for each other. It provides time-proven comprehensive solutions that help couples reconnect with each other sexually, and take their intimacy and passion to new, previously unexplored heights.

Scenes of Intimacy

Scenes of Intimacy
Author: Jennifer Cooke
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2013-03-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441185445

Scenes of Intimacy analyzes the representation of acts and relationships of intimacy in contemporary literature, the effect this has upon readers, and the ways these representations resonate with, complement, and challenge the concerns of contemporary theory. Opening with an in-depth interview with literary critic, Derridean, and novelist Professor Nicholas Royle, the volume contains eleven further essays that move from intimate scenes of familial and pedagogic legacy, on to representations of love, of sex, and finally to scenes of death and dying. The essays are textually attentive to how literary techniques create intimacy, and draw upon new and notable theoretical positions and critics from queer theory, affect studies, psychoanalysis, poststructualism and deconstruction to ask difficult and uncomfortable questions about intimacy and its representation. Across the genres of poetry, autobiography, journals, love letters, short stories and novels, Scenes of Intimacy shows that contemporary literature poses new possibilities and questions about our intimate relationalities, their failures and their futures.

The Sex Texts

The Sex Texts
Author: Arthur L.
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2013-09-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1434929469

For all intent, virtually all accepted mainstream Catholic Christian tenets remain untouched for the past two millennia. It follows then that we take for evident truths¿for example, our views on the Creator and creation¿s sexuality, gender issues, and human relationship concerns¿may in fact be nothing but establishment dogmas gleaned from wrong interpretation or translation of the original text and intent of Jesus Christ and the Bible authors. Now, isn¿t the mere chance of that being true too scary? The Sex Texts: Sexuality, Gender, and Relationships in the Bible by L. Robert Arthur raises just that possibility, despite the strong likelihood of facing stiff criticism from many sectors, mostly of the established Catholic persuasion. Yet those inclined to know the true message of Jesus Christ and his closest disciples may well take heed to scrutinize, at the very least, what Robert is trying to point out in his work. The Sex Texts: Sexuality, Gender, and Relationships in the Bible promises to raise a storm, but the public debate it could engender may yet start a new direction for the rest of humanity.

Romantic Intimacy

Romantic Intimacy
Author: Nancy Yousef
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2013-09-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0804788278

How much can we know about what other people are feeling and how much can we sympathize or empathize with them? The term "intimacy" captures a tension between a confidence in the possibility of shared experience and a competing belief that thoughts and feelings are irreducibly private. This book is an interdisciplinary study of shared feeling as imagined in eighteenth-century ethics, romantic literature, and twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Original interpretations of Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Austen show how mutual recognition gives way to the appreciation of varied, nonreciprocal forms of intimacy. The book concludes with accounts of empathy and unconscious communication in the psychoanalytic setting, revealing the persistence of romantic preoccupations in modernity. Yousef offers a compelling account of how philosophical confidence in sympathy is transformed by literary attention to uneven forms of emotional response, including gratitude, disappointment, distraction, and absorption. In its wide-ranging and eclectic engagement with current debates on the relationship between ethics, affect, and aesthetics, the book will be crucial reading for students of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, as well as for literary theorists.

Moving Subjects

Moving Subjects
Author: Tony Ballantyne
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 0252075684

Investigating how intimacy is constructed across the restless world of empire

Conditions of Love

Conditions of Love
Author: John Armstrong
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2002
Genre: Love
ISBN: 9780140294712

What does it really mean to love another person? Is there such a thing as the 'perfect' partner? How does infatuation differ from the real thing?The need to love is central to our idea of happiness, yet it sometimes seems that the more we reflect on it the more elusive it becomes. In this lucid and graceful meditation on the deeper meanings of intimacy, John Armstrong explores the ideas that have shaped how we view affairs of the heart. Drawing on poetry, novels, philosophy, paintings and music, he shows how love is inextricably bound up with perception and the imagination: that loving a real, complicated person and being understood and valued by them in turn is not something we find, but rather something we create.