The year 2019 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of
Kurt Cobain, an artist whose music, words, and images continue to
move millions of fans worldwide. As the first academic study that
provides a literary analysis of Cobain's creative writings, Arthur
Flannigan Saint-Aubin's The Pleasures of Death: Kurt Cobain's
Masochistic and Melancholic Persona approaches the journals and
songs crafted by Nirvana's iconic front man from the perspective of
cultural theory and psychoanalytic aesthetics. Drawing on critiques
and reformulations of psychoanalytic theory by feminist, queer, and
antiracist scholars, Saint-Aubin considers the literary means by
which Cobain creates the persona of a young, white, heterosexual
man who expresses masochistic and melancholic behaviors. On the one
hand, this individual welcomes pain and humiliation as atonement
for unpardonable sins; on the other, he experiences a profound
sense of loss and grief, seeking death as the ultimate act of
pleasure. The first-person narrators and characters that populate
Cobain's texts underscore the political and aesthetic repercussions
of his art. Cobain's distinctive version of grunge, understood as a
subculture, a literary genre, and a cultural practice, represents a
specific performance of race and gender, one that facilitates an
understanding of the self as part of a larger social order.
Saint-Aubin approaches Cobain's writings independently of the
artist's biography, positioning these texts within the tradition of
postmodern representations of masculinity in twentieth-century
American fiction, while also suggesting connections to European
Romantic traditions from the nineteenth century that postulate a
relation between melancholy (or depression) and creativity. In
turn, through Saint-Aubin's elegant analysis, Cobain's creative
writings illuminate contradictions and inconsistencies within
psychoanalytic theory itself concerning the intersection of
masculinity, masochism, melancholy, and the death drive. By
foregrounding Cobain's ability to challenge coextensive links
between gender, sexuality, and race, The Pleasures of Death reveals
how the cultural politics and aesthetics of this tragic icon's
works align with feminist strategies, invite queer readings, and
perform antiracist critiques of American culture.
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