Reading the Male Gaze in Literature and Culture - Studies in Erotic Epistemology

This book examines the phenomenon of 'the male gaze', a concept which has spread beyond academia and become a staple of cultural conversations across disciplinary boundaries.

Male gazing has typically been disparaged and even stigmatized as a reflection of misogyny and an instrument of objectification, often justifiably so. But as this book argues and illustrates, male gazing can also be understood as an illuminating, intellectually engaging, aesthetically compelling, and even politically progressive practice. This study recounts how the author's own coming-of-an-age as a gazer became the basis for his long career teaching and writing about American fiction and poetry and poetry, canonical and contemporary, as well as about film, painting, TV, and rock-and-roll. It includes closely-reasoned analyses of work by James Baldwin, Rembrandt, Willa Cather, Philip Roth, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Bob Dylan, Robert Stone,Tim O'Brien, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Frank O'Hara, Italo Calvino, John Schlesinger as well such cultural phenomena as the British Invasion of the 1960s, the Judgment of Paris in Greek mythology, the technology of seeing (kaleidoscopes, microscopes, telescopes) and the concept of 'objectification' itself.

James D. Bloom is Professor of English at Muhlenberg College, USA. His books include Hollywood Intellect (2009), Gravity Fails (2003) and The Literary Bent (1997). His essays and reviews have appeared in American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, the European Journal of American Culture, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Style, the New York Times Book Review, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Creem.