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Novel Gazing is 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, children’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 of Novel Gazing extend 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
List of contents
Acknowledgments vii
Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 1
Part I. Digital Senses
Prophylactics and Brains:
Beloved in the Cybernetic Age of AIDS / Kathryn Bond Stockton 41
Strange Gourmet: Taste, Waste, Proust / Joseph Litvak 74
Outing Texture / Renu Bora 94
The "Sinister Fruitiness" of Machines:
Neuromancer, Internet Sexuality, and the Turing Test / Tyler Curtain 128
Part II. The Affective Life of Capital
The Importance of Being Bored: The Dividends of Ennui in
The Picture of Dorian Gray / Jeff Nunokawa 151
Balzac's Queer Cousins and Their Friends / Michael Lucey 167
Part III. Teacher's Pet
Defying "Development": Thomas Day's Queer Curriculum in
Sandford and Merton / Anne Chandler 201
Wizards, Warriors, and the Beast Glatisant in Love / Barry Weller 227
Forged in Crisis: Queer Beginnings of Modern Masculinity in a Canonical French Novel / James Creech 249
Flogging is Fundamental: Applications of Birch in Swinburne's
Lesbia Brandon / John Vincent 269
Part IV. Men and Nations
Same-Sex Unions in Modern Europe:
Daniel Deronda,
Altneuland, and the Homoerotics of Jewish Nationalism / Jacob Press 299
To Die For / Cindy Patton 330
Tearing the Goat's Flesh: Crisis, Homosexuality, Abjection, and the Production of a Late-Twentieth-Century Black Masculinity / Robert F. Reid-Pharr 353
Part V. Libidinal Intelligence: Shocks and Recognitions
The Autochoreography of an Ex-Snow Queen: Dance, Desire, and the Black Masculine in Melvin Dixon's
Vanishing Rooms / Maurice Wallace 379
Lip-Reading: Woolf's Secret Encounters / Stephen Barber 401
The Female World of Exorcism and Displacement (Or, Relations between Women in Henry James's Nineteenth-Century
The Portrait of a Lady) / Melissa Solomon 444
Strange Brothers / Jonathan Goldberg 465
Bibliography 483
Index 501
Contributors 517
About the author
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center. Books she has authored include Fat Art/Thin Art and Tendencies. She has edited or coedited numerous volumes, including Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader and Gary In Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher, also published by Duke University Press.
Summary
Offers a collection of queer criticism on the history of the novel. This title includes startingly imaginative essays that explore critical practices that can weave the pleasures and disorientations of reading into the fabric of queer analyses.
