Leonard Cohen's Traffic in Alterity in Beautiful Losers

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
Leonard Cohen's Traffic in Alterity in Beautiful Losers
Abstract
The author contends that while Leonard Cohen’s 1966 novel Beautiful Losers deserves its reputation as a subversive text insomuch as its overall libidinal freedom -- the "obscene" references to the anal and scatological in particular -- can be seen as disrupting sexual norms, in the end Cohen's example of what Linda Hutcheon tags "postmodern metafiction" simply reinscribes and reaffirms the (hetero)normative order of dominant knowledges, social hierarchies, and binary oppositions. The author’s an analysis of Beautiful Losers drawing on the criticism of Irigaray, Sedgwick, and Seidman suggests that despite postmodern claims for Cohen's disruption of traditional constructions and understandings of gendered identities in his narrative, the novel is still governed by a rhetoric of hierarchical dominant male discourses. He concludes that the traffic in alterity presented in Cohen's text is falsely congruent with the presumption that simple evocation of otherness implies understanding and knowledge of the Other's specific and discrete difference.
Publication
Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne
Volume
Vol. 22
Issue
no. 2
Pages
56-66
Date
Summer 1997
Language
en
URL
Citation
Lesk, Andrew. “Leonard Cohen’s Traffic in Alterity in Beautiful Losers.” Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne Vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 56–66. https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/scl/1997-v22-n2-scl_22_2/scl22_2art04.pdf.
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