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E-book Cosmopolitan Love : Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang

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Penilaian

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Love as a feeling is universal. Since we all have a sense for what it means, this default understanding of love is as deeply rooted and unconsciously ingrained in us as our relationship to our own family. Consequently, we are too familiar with it to be able to step back and really observe its form and significance. To really see what love is would require us to step outside of ourselves, as if we had been born in a different time and place. It is only through approaching love in a drastically different cultural system that we are able to truly see the real picture of love in our own mind as well as in the minds of others. To understand love requires a comparison, and to understand the ideas of Chinese love and Western love we need to step out of the confines of each tradition to compare how the concept of love emerged and developed in distinct ways in each context. In the Western tradition, Plato defines love (éros) as the “desire for the perpetual possession of the good” in The Symposium, and Aristotle discusses friendship (philía) in his Nicomachean Ethics.3 They thereby establish an important place for love within an overall metaphysical and political framework. As C. S. Lewis notes, Plato’s éros, philosophical and transcendental, mounts the ladder ascending to the divine, and he ide-alizes love as “goodness” and “absolute beauty.” One reaches the higher rungs by leaving the lower ones behind: “We find the conception of a lad-der whereby the soul may ascend from human love to divine. . . . The original object of human love has simply fallen out of sight before the soul arrives at the spiritual object.”4 Drawing on the Greek tradition, Christian-ity placed love at the center of its metaphysical framework by establishing love as the key characteristic of the divine. Since God is love in this con-ception, Christian love, divine and metaphysical, eradicates carnal desire and primitive thoughts.In the later tradition of medieval courtly love beginning in the twelfth century and romantic love starting in the seventeenth century, love becomes increasingly detached from the metaphysical context, even though courtly and romantic love depend upon Christian tropes to main-tain an intensity of the love relationship. The development of romantic love out of a Christian conception of sacrifice maintains the centrality of love for emotional life, transferring transcendence into the experience of a romantic couple. Denis de Rougemont traces the evolution of roman-tic love, arguing that passionate love afflicts, and simultaneously elevates, human beings. By examining famous literary texts in the West starting from the legend of Tristan and Isolde, he posits that suffering, obstruc-tion, and death thwart passion but, at the same time, foster and ennoble romantic love. De Rougement points out that romance is the parting of the lovers. What the lovers “need is not one another’s presence, but one another’s absence. Thus, the partings of the lovers are dictated by their passion itself, and by the love they bestow on their passion rather than on its satisfaction or on its living object. That is why the Romance abounds in obstructions.”5 In the end, romance requires death for its perfect triumph, climax, and fulfillment. The absence of the lover stirs, fosters, and glorifies the feeling of love by linking it to sacrifice and renunciation.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

823 YAO c

Penerbit

USA : University of Michigan Press., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

173 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

978047290393

Klasifikasi

823

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

English Fiction

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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