Novel Gazing

by Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky; Barale, Michele Aina; Goldberg, Jonathan; Moon, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780822320401
• ISBN10: 0822320401
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-12-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

Novel Gazingis the first collection of queer criticism on the history of the novel. The contributors to this volume navigate new territory in literary theory with essays that implicitly challenge the "hermeneutic of suspicion" widespread in current critical theory. In a stunning introductory essay, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick delineates the possibilities for a criticism that would be "reparative" rather than cynical or paranoid. The startlingly imaginative essays in the volume explore new critical practices that can weave the pleasures and disorientations of reading into the fabric of queer analyses. Through discussions of a diverse array of British, French, and American novels-including major canonical novels, best-sellers, childrenrs"s fiction, and science fiction-these essays explore queer worlds of taste, texture, joy, and ennui, focusing on such subjects as flogging, wizardry, exorcism, dance, Zionist desire, and Internet sexuality. Interpreting the works of authors as diverse as Benjamin Constant, Toni Morrison, T. H. White, and William Gibson, along with canonical queer modernists such as James, Proust, Woolf, and Cather, contributors reveal the wealth of ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them. The dramatic reframing that these essays perform will make the significance ofNovel Gazingextend beyond the scope of queer studies to literary criticism in general.Contributors. Stephen Barber, Renu Bora, Anne Chandler, James Creech, Tyler Curtain, Jonathan Goldberg, Joseph Litvak, Michael Lucey, Jeff Nunokawa, Cindy Patton, Jacob Press, Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Melissa Solomon, Kathryn Bond Stockton, John Vincent, Maurice Wallace, Barry Weller

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You

Digital Senses

Prophylactics and Brains: Beloved in the Cybernetic Age of AIDS

Strange Gourmet: Taste, Waste, Proust

Outing Texture

The "Sinister Fruitiness" of Machines: Neuromancer, Internet Sexuality, and the Turing Test

The Affective Life of Capital

The Importance of Being Bored: The Dividends of Ennui in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Balzac's Queer Cousins and Their Friends

Teacher's Pet

Defying "Development": Thomas Day's Queer Curriculum in Sandford and Merton

Wizards, Warriors, and the Beast Glatisant in Love

Forged in Crisis: Queer Beginnings of Modern Masculinity in a Canonical French Novel

Flogging is Fundamental: Applications of Birch in Swinburne's Lesbia Brandon

Men and Nations

Same-Sex Unions in Modern Europe: Daniel Deronda, Altneuland, and the Homoerotics of Jewish Nationalism

To Die For

Tearing the Goat's Flesh: Crisis, Homosexuality, Abjection, and the Production of a Late-Twentieth-Century Black Masculinity

Libidinal Intelligence: Shocks and Recognitions

The Autochoreography of an Ex-Snow Queen: Dance, Desire, and the Black Masculine in Melvin Dixon's Vanishing Rooms

Lip-Reading: Woolf's Secret Encounters

The Female World of Exorcism and Displacement (Or, Relations between Women in Henry James's Nineteenth-Century The Portrait of a Lady)

Strange Brothers

Bibliography

Index

Contributors

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