This Perversion Called Love

By: Margherita Long

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Synopsis: Long (comparative literature and foreign languages, U. of California, Riverside) considers sexual perversion in Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's aesthetic essays, cultural criticism, cinema writings, and short novels from the 1930s, intersections with psychoanalysis, and what this means from a feminist perspective. She contends that Tanizaki sees human subjectivity in the same way as Freud, but that he is more critical than Freud about the possibility of love, that such love is impossible in a monosexual perspective. Using a feminist approach, she provides a psychoanalytic look at the intellectual climate of 1930s Japan and Tanazaki's essays within this context; outlines parallels with Freud's ideas of masochism; analyzes Tanazaki's novels in terms of feminist ideas; and discusses his contribution to the feminist debate on maternity, and parallels to feminist film theory in his cinema essays, especially how in feminist film theory, cinema equates women with absence. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc. , Portland, OR (booknews. com)