Overview

Proposes that we can best understand literature's relationship to sex through a renewed focus on masochism. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, critic and playwright Julia Jarcho argues that these works conceive writing itself as masochistic, and masochism as sexuality enacted in writing. Throw Yourself Away is distinctive in its sustained focus on masochism as an engine of literary production across multiple authors and genres. In particular, Jarcho shows that theater has played a central role in modern erotic fantasies of the literary. Jarcho foregrounds writing as a project of distressed subjects: When masochistic writing is examined as a strategy of response to injurious social systems, it yields a surprisingly feminized-and less uniformly white-image of both masochism and authorship. Ultimately, Jarcho argues that a retheorized concept of masochism helps us understand literature itself as a sex act and shows us how writing can tend to our burdened, desirous bodies. With startling insights into such writers as Henry James, Henrik Ibsen, Mary Gaitskill, and Adrienne Kennedy, Throw Yourself Away furnishes a new masochistic theory of literature itself.

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9780226835020

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Reviews

“Reading masochism as a technology of world-building, Jarcho attends to the intersections of desire, negation, and race. Brilliant and seductive, this book illuminates how fantasy gets transmitted, casting the masochist as an important architect for our present moment. You’ll never be able to think of masochism or the self in the same way again.” * Amber Jamilla Musser, Graduate Center, City University of New York * “From its charming opening assertion that ‘Masochism is basic’ to its final reflections on the devastations of motherhood, Throw Yourself Away is bracing, passionate, and self-critical. Jarcho imagines the scene of writing as masochistic, one that depends on the author’s will to formal closure and her desire to leave the door open to something else. Jarcho offers brilliant analyses of this fantasy in a range of texts, including her own. Throw Yourself Away is a live critical event, high-stakes and utterly compelling.” * Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania *

Author Information

Julia Jarcho is a writer, theater artist, and scholar. She is head of playwriting and associate professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University and an OBIE Award–winning playwright and director with the New York-based company Minor Theater. Her plays have been published in the collection Minor Theater: Three Plays, and she is the author of Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater beyond Drama.

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