The role of psychology, the relationship with culture, and a profile of today’s main cultural psychologies (and pathologies).

It is humbling to be human. Humilitatem and humanitas have always been connected. So, Shakespeare’s characters know when they are "not gentle, not humble" [Love’s, 5,2,617]. But living in an age of service, their creator was also conscious of the fine line between humility and humiliation. Persistently, his plays therefore stage the "Cinderella" scenario of a "proud humility" [All’s Well, 1,1,172], as if he had internalized the self-abjection by which power abases itself in "the gown of humility" [Coriolanus, 2,3,36]. Almost all of Shakespeare’s references to humility describe it as an act. Hence, "I have sounded the very base-string of humility" [1Henry IV, 2,5,5], reports his most winning king. In staging his own "abject position," as a professional "waiter" on the mighty, "our humble author" [2Henry IV, Epi, 23] thereby seems to anticipate modern skepticism towards the false modesty of the "humbled visaged" [Love’s, 2,,34], the "meekness and humility" that is "cramm’d" with "arrogancy, spleen and pride" [Henry VIII, 2,4107-108]. This chapter on humility argues that Shakespeare’s dramatization of the supposed virtue has never been more relevant than in our own populist times, when the clown prince dives into our hearts, "with humble and familiar" smiles [Richard II, 1,4,25-27].

Chapter 2 examines the significance of the association between music and masochism in texts by Walter Pater, Vernon Lee and Arthur Symons. Here music is variously figured as acting upon the body in a manner that resists the imposition of identity and refuses the coherence of the self, while turning instead to modes of self-abandonment and disembodiment. Music in Pater’s ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ dramatizes a broader oscillation in his works between the denial and embrace of wilfully self-destructive masochistic violence. In ‘Marsyas in Flanders’ (1900), Vernon Lee strategically embraces the figure of Marsyas – an emblem of musical masochism – as a means of resisting the categorization of the queer body by fin-de-siècle sexology. In Symons’s ‘Christian Trevalga’ (1902) music becomes associated with a desire to abandon the materiality of the body and affirm instead a form of subjectivity defined by ‘disembodiment’. Symons’s essays on music and musical performance present the aesthetic autonomy of absolute music in a manner that articulates a form of dispersed subjectivity that can profitably be read in the light of contemporary queer theory.

Building on Gustavo Pellón’s classification of Spanish-American novels as documentary novels (novela testimonio), historical novels, detective novels, and marginalized novels, this chapter places them into two groups of psychoanalytic categories: voyeurism/exhibitionism and sadism/masochism, that influence the identity of the subject. The schematic voyeurism-exhibitionism/sadism-masochism in the novels explored in this chapter places focus on concepts that imply an Ego placing its gaze on the world; it acknowledges that we are in constant repetition, learning how to deal with the levels of violence and pain, which, in essence, is translated into how to deal with the Eros and Death drives. Examining Rosario Tijeras by Jorge Franco as a case study, the chapter explores the applicability of psychoanalysis as it applies to these texts and considers some of the other categories of novels that emerge from this larger, complex cultural context of Latin American literature.

In Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs, three ‘Negresses’ magically appear at the moment that the speaker signs away his legal rights to life. This fantasy is an example of how actual bondage and historical slavery shape the sadomasochistic imagination. This chapter traces that imagination through poems by Algernon Charles Swinburne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, written at the height of Victorian sexology. It looks at the metaphor of the plough or the ploughman in relation to bondage and Hopkins’s class politics, and at the flagellation fantasies in Swinburne’s poetry (including his juvenile compositions), and the way that those poems fetishise the foot, mouth and ‘bum’. It discusses the theatricality and suspension of agency involved in masochism in relation to specific examples of colonial violence, to challenge the idea that the voluntary submission to constraint in radical sex practices can undermine forms of social domination.

Chapter launches project of taking Naso’s desire seriously. Reads Naso’s desire alongside Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, focusing on Naso’s desire to script scenes in which he is at the mercy of his girlfriend; his fascination with the blurred boundary between art-objects and flesh, especially visible in simile-clusters; his interest in castration; and the recurrrence, starting with the poems on Corinna’s abortion, of a “maternal fantasy” in which he plays alternately the mother and the baby. Key poems: Amores 1.7, 2.19, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.13, 2.14, 2.15