The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity - Softcover

McNulty, Tracy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816647410 ISBN 13: 9780816647415

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2006

Synopsis

The evolution of the idea of hospitality can be traced alongside the development of Western civilization. Etymologically, the host is the "master," but this identity is established through expropriation and loss-the best host is the one who gives the most, ultimately relinquishing what defines him as master.In The Hostess, Tracy McNulty asks, What are the implications for personhood of sharing a person-a wife or daughter-as an act of hospitality? In many traditions, the hostess is viewed not as a subject but as the master's property. A foreign presence that both sustains and undercuts him, the hostess embodies the interplay of self and other within the host's own identity.Here McNulty combines critical readings of the Bible and Pierre Klossowski's trilogy The Laws of Hospitality with analyses of exogamous marital exchange, theological works from the Talmud to Aquinas, the writings of Kant and Nietzsche, and the theory of femininity in the work of Freud and Lacan. Ultimately, she contends, hospitality involves the boundary between the proper and the improper, affecting the subject as well as interpersonal relations.Tracy McNulty is assistant professor of romance studies at Cornell University.

About this title

Synopsis

McNulty (romance studies, Cornell U.) finds that hospitality contains within it a situation in which the host is reduced to the extent that he gives of himself and his goods to the guest. Among those goods to be given she finds the hostess, the wife or daughter of the host, who can offer hospitality without reduction of the host, but who is also li

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0816647410
• ISBN 13: 9780816647415
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336