Criticism articles from March 2010

Criticism archives from March 2010

Introduction.
March 22, 2010... This special issue grew out of the event "Honoring Eve: A Symposium Celebrating the Work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick," which was held on 31 October 2009 at Boston University (BU), about six months after Sedgwick passed away on 12 April. More than...

Opening remarks for honoring Eve symposium, 31 October 2009.
March 22, 2010... I'm grateful to the members of the Boston University (BU) Junior Faculty Gender and Sexuality Studies Group for organizing this symposium honoring Eve and also for very kindly inviting me to be here. It's about twenty-five years ago that Eve was...

The Boston years: Eve's humor and her anger.(Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick)(Essay)
March 22, 2010... I'll always be happy to remember that I was the junior member on the hiring committee that lured Eve Sedgwick to Boston University (BU) from Hamilton College. We were unanimously amazed with her essay on the Gothic veil, soon to appear in PMLA....

Unnamed: Eve's Epistemology.(Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2010... Given the saliency, etymologically, of honesty to honor, we might start with a bit of honesty if we want to honor eve. The rubric assigned to this panel, "Feminism and Queer Theory," performs, in its blandly copulative way, a violence against...

Feminism, queer theory, and the racial closet.(Essay)
March 22, 2010... When Erin Murphy and Keith Vincent first contacted me to participate in this symposium, I started thinking about the first time that I encountered Eve Sedgwick and Epistemology of the Closet. (1) I knew that I had been in graduate school at the...

The courage of curiosity, or the heart of truth (a mash-up).(Essay)
March 22, 2010... Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity, futility. The word, however, pleases me. To me it suggests something altogether different: it evokes...

Psychosomatic? Mental and physical pain in Eve Sedgwick's writing.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2010... I knew Ian Watt, the author of The Rise of the Novel (1957), a little in his later years, and he once told me a story about his having been one of the Cambridge undergraduates in the 1930s who had invited Gertrude Stein to the university to...

Love without the obligation to love.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2010... No reader--therapy fellow traveler, critic, homologously positioned academic or artist--can help but be moved by the eloquence with which Eve Sedgwick's A Dialogue on Love conveys the gripping struggle with mortality, not first in the face of...

"Unlike Eve Sedgwick".(Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2010... The moments in eve Sedgwick's writing I have returned to most often are the ones where she is engaged in a palpable, even flamboyant, effort to make her readers not just smarter, but happier, too, to provide them with resources for revising the...

Truth and consequences: on paranoid reading and reparative reading.(Essay)
March 22, 2010... Perhaps the most common description of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work is enabling--I have used it myself many times to describe her effect on me. But I sometimes wonder whether I know what this word means. The problem could be overdetermination:...

Trapped in the closet with Eve.(Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick)(Essay)
March 22, 2010... One of the problems with the turn to affect in queer studies is that, when we were talking about sexuality, everyone at least thought they knew what we were talking about, even those who felt we shouldn't be talking about any such thing. After...

Sedgwick's nerve.(Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2010... At the end of "Proust and the Spectacle of the closet," which is also the end of Epistemology of the Closet,1 eve kosofsky Sedgwick evokes the figure of the woman who cannot know: "the omnipotent, unknowing mother" to whom Proust's novel is...

Some scenes in Proust.(Marcel Proust)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2010... In Epistemology of the Closet, (1) Eve wrote that Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time "has remained... the most vital center of the energies of gay literary high culture, as well as of many manifestations of modern literary high culture in...

Re-creating Eve: Sedgwick's art and the practice of renewal.(Essay)
March 22, 2010... Eve Sedgwick's forthcoming essay, "The Weather in Proust," begins with the Hubert Robert fountain as a model of Neoplatonic rebirth: millions of lives like water droplets, yearning towards the sky and either being propelled by other energetic...

On the Eve of the future.(Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick)(Essay)
March 22, 2010... It was as Eve's literary executor that I believe I first encountered a talk she gave about a decade ago that was called, in its various incarnations, "Come as you Are" or "Reality and Realization." (1) I don't recall that Eve shared it with me...

Writing the plural: sexual fantasies: ID 450 Collective.(Essay)
March 22, 2010... INTRODUCTION BY DEBoRAH SWEDBERG A long time ago, in the fall of 1982, the second of the two years Eve was at Boston University, a group of 10-12 people got together to study feminist texts. A few of us, including Eve, had already been...

Unreason, love, and un-becoming queer.(Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory )(Book review)
March 22, 2010... Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory by Lynne Huffer. gender and culture series. New York city: columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. 376, 10 illustrations. $84.50 cloth, $27.50 paper. Mad for Foucault, Lynne Huffer's...

Leo Bersani and the universe.(Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays)(Book review)
March 22, 2010... Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays by Leo Bersani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. 224. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. Over the past twenty-five years, while formulating a series of influential theses about sex, Leo Bersani...

Trading futures: queer theory's anti-antirelational turn.(Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity )(Book review)
March 22, 2010... Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by Jose Esteban Munoz. Sexual Cultures series. New York City: New York University Press, 2009. Pp. 240, 29 illustrations. $19.00 paper. Jose Esteban Munoz's new book fights for the future...

"I won't grow up".(Book review)
March 22, 2010... The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century by Kathryn Bond Stockton. Series Q. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Pp. 312, 44 illustrations. $79.95 cloth, $22.95 paper. Kathryn Bond Stockton, in her daring and often...

A moderately gay history.(The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America )(Book review)
March 22, 2010... The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America by Margot Canaday. Politics and Society in twentieth Century America series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. 296, 6 illustrations. $29.95 cloth. ...

Queer Marx.(The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism )(Book review)
March 22, 2010... The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism by Kevin Floyd. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. 304, 4 black-and-white photos. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. In the introduction to his collection of essays For Marx...

Sadness: seriously.(Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History )(Book review)
March 22, 2010... Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History by Heather Love. Harvard, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 206. $42.00 cloth, $16.95 paper. In Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather love offers a...