Love Stories: The Discourses of Desire in Literature and Culture, 1800 – the Present Session Five

Agenda  Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook  Belsey, ”Postmodern Love”

The love of art  Artistic value is produced by the artist and is inherrent in the work of art (Harold Bloom, Genius)  Artistic value is produced socially and culturally by the participants of the field (Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, The Field of Cultural Production, The Rules of Art

When Love Speaks: The Circulation of Capital  RADA (high cultural capital, agent of consecration, financial capital)  The performing artists (high cultural capital, popular cultural capital)  Authors (Shakespeare and Marlowe: HIGH cultural capital) and composers  The work of art: When Love Speaks: ”The timeless magic of Shakespeare”  The audience: financial capital – (high) cultural capital  RADA (financial capital …)

Jeanette Winterson  Jeanettewinterson.com  What determines the value of art according to Winterson and her website?  What’s the point of her website?

Jeanettewinterson.com ”Books”  Action Station  This is the action station. What more do you want? We've got content, we've got your questions answered, we've got Virginia Woolf, and we've got a fab Flash Movie. Move over Stephen King.  The books are the best of me. When people ask me why I write I tell them it's what I'm for. It really is as simple as that.  In the following pages you'll find excerpts from all the books, my own view of what they are and how they work, and an easy way to buy them. You don't have to buy them but a little retail therapy won't do any harm in the middle of all this art and life.  I've included a Virginia Woolf mini-site because I recently edited a new edition of her fiction. I wanted to get away from the typical Introduction format and so I chose 2 writers - one a critic and the other a fiction writer or poet to come at each book in their own way. I wanted the introductions to act as doorways into the work, because the only real way into a book is to open it. Never mind the theories or the criticism or the exam questions and the dissertations just open the book.  If there's anything else you fancy, just let me know.

The PowerBook  First impressions: interesting features  The title  The menu  Style and voice  The characters

Belsey, ”Postmodern Love”  The paradox of postmodern love: the site of absolute value and the site of scepticism