Epistemology of the Closet

by Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky

• ISBN13: 9780520254060
• ISBN10: 0520254066
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-01-17
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual and political life of the United States. This has been due, in no small degree, to the influence of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critically acclaimedEpistemology of the Closet.Working from classic texts of European and American writers--including Melville, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Wilde--Sedgwick analyzes a turn-of-the-century historical moment in which sexual orientation became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In her preface to this updated edition Sedgwick places the book both personally and historically, looking specifically at the horror of the first wave of the AIDS epidemic and its influence on the text.

Author Biography

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York Graduate Center

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Credits	p. xi
Preface to the 2008 Edition	p. xiii
Introduction: Axiomatic	p. 1
Epistemology of the Closet	p. 67
Some Binarisms (I): Billy Budd: After the Homosexual	p. 91
Some Binarisms (II): Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Sentimental Relations of the Male Body	p. 131
The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic	p. 182
Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet	p. 213
Index	p. 253
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