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Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self
Author: Dustin Friedman
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div id=iframeContent dir=autoLate Victorian aesthetes were dedicated to the belief that an artworks value derived solely from its beauty, rather than any moral or utilitarian purpose. Works by these queer artists have rarely been taken seriously as contributions to the theories of sexuality or aesthetics. But in Before Queer Theory, Dustin Friedman argues that aestheticism deploys its art for arts sake rhetoric to establish a nascent sense of sexual identity and community.Friedman makes the case for a claim rarely articulated in either Victorian or modern culture that intellectually, creatively, and ethically, being queer can be an advantage not in spite but because of social hostility toward nonnormative desires. Showing how aesthetesamong them Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Michael Fieldharnessed the force that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called the negative, Friedman reveals how becoming self-aware of ones sexuality through art can be both liberating and affirming of humanitys capacity for subjective autonomy.Challenging one of the central precepts of modern queer theorythe notion that the heroic subject of Enlightenment thought is merely an effect of discourse and powerFriedman develops a new framework for understanding the relationship between desire and self-determination. He also articulates an innovative, queer notion of subjective autonomy that encourages reflecting critically on ones historical moment and envisioning new modes of seeing, thinking, and living that expand the boundaries of social and intellectual structures. Before Queer Theory is an audacious reimagining that will appeal to scholars with interests in Victorian studies, queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, and art history.Review An exciting and original account of late-Victorian aestheticism that joins intellectual history, close reading, and queer theory. Against narratives that emphasize queer fragmentation, marginalization, and social determination, Friedman tells a story in which autonomy and freedom are given center stage. The books literary sensitivity is matched by its critical acumen revelatory. (Benjamin Morgan, The University of Chicago, author of The Outward Mind Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature ) This impressive book, written in compellingly lucid and assured prose, offers a distinctive contribution to the study of both aestheticism and queer theory. (James Eli Adams, Columbia University, author of A History of Victorian Literature ) Dustin Friedman writes rigorously and compellingly about the investment of Victorian aestheticism in earlier aesthetic philosophy, especially Hegel and Kant, but also brings that inspiration to the present day with an insightful thesis on the conceptual challenge of aestheticism for recent queer theory. A very smart and readable discussion! (Ellis Hanson, Cornell University, editor of Out Takes Essays on Queer Theory and Film ) A stunning debut that traces a genealogy of queer aesthetic thought from idealist philosophy to modern queer theory and routes this genealogy through British aestheticism. Focusing on the erotic negativity of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Michael Field, Dustin Friedman shows how queer aesthetes at the fin de siecle asserted a homoeroticized version of Hegelian negativity, one that continues to inspire queer thought today. (Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, University of California, Davis, author of Slow Print Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture ) In a study of great passion and unusual lucidity, Dustin Friedman proposes a bold recalibration of our understanding of the intersection of same-sex desire and the development of modern aesthetics. How does the passionate response to beauty relate to the lived experience of non-normative sexual identity? How might concepts of historical development often taken to ratify the most conservative tendencies in culture provide models for recovering subject positions that evidently run counter to such tendencies? Moving beyond widely-held conventions and critical commonplaces, this study revivifies the work of major philosophers and critics even as it compellingly illuminates the fundamental role of illicit passions in shaping their influence. Informed at once by close attention to central debates in queer theory, nuanced engagement with the nineteenth-century aesthetic tradition, and careful analysis of the intersection of desire, idea, and form in major works of British aestheticism, Before Queer Theory offers a sound introduction to the major fields on which it touches and a heartfelt polemical intervention into recent debates on the articulation of queer identity with the past and future. (Jonah Siegel, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, author of Desire and Excess The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art )
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147892
Author: John M. Picker
File Type: pdf
Far from the hushed restraint we associate with the Victorians, their world pulsated with sound. This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The representations close listeners left of their soundscapes offered new meanings for silence, music, noise, voice, and echo that constitute an important part of the Victorian legacy to us today. In chronicling the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, Picker draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural discovery figures such as Babbage, Helmholtz, Freud, Bell, and Edison shared with the likes of Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Stoker, and Conrad.ReviewPicker is suggestive, intelligent and insightful.... There are enough fine chords struck and suggestions made so his own soundscape keeps resonating after the book is closed.... [He] is subtly and ingeniously correct...in his dissection of George Eliots Daniel Deronda.--Edward Rothstein, The New York TimesA pioneering work on an important topic.... Fascinating.... Important for [its] interest in how the senses register modernity, and for the broader social implications of the ways in which the outside world penetrates the bodily sensorium, whether the ear accommodates, or is jarred by, the impact of technology and of commerce.--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900[A] brilliant interweaving of diverse texts and fields around the Victorian cultural response to the perceiving body.--AlbionPoised to propel further study of Victorian acoustic culture, an outgrowth and counterpart to widespread study of visual technologies.--Victorian PoetryPickers Victorian Soundscapes brilliantly evokes not only the sheer noisiness of nineteenth-century city life, but also the vibrancy of authorial response to it.... His approach is absorbingly persuasive.--Dickens QuarterlyInformed and freshly provocative. These close readings of fin-de-siecle literary texts underscore Pickers primary contribution to the field. Victorian Soundscapes adds a new sonic layer of meaning to literary works about which we thought wed heard it all before.--Victorian StudiesThe past few years of scholarly work have treated us to an amazing playback of Victorian sounds, with John Pickers excellent book holding a central place in that recovery effort.... An elegant orchestration of some of those sounds that teaches our scholarly ears how to listen better. No one who reads it will fail to appreciate, as the Victorians did themselves, their acoustic culture.--Jonathan Grossman, Modern PhilologyThe kind of work that Picker exhibits here represents the best of contemporary cultural criticism.--Victorian Literature and CulturePicker amplifies the faint murmur of soundscape studies, which have reached their steadiest hum in work on the twentieth century, through this ear-opening study of sound in Victorian literature and culture.--Modern Language QuarterlyOne of the most exciting recent developments in the history of consciousness has been a heightened awareness of listening an exploration of how acoustic environments, the technologies of sound, and the means of vocal communication shape our sense of ourselves and of the worlds we live in. John Pickers Victorian Soundscapes speaks on this topic with an assured voice. It offers the attentive ear both a rich trove of historical lore and an incisive analysis of how modern acoustics became a part of modern subjectivity. The book is rewarding both as a study of Victorian close listening in its own right and as a source of resonant case studies in the emerging field of cultural acoustics.--Lawrence Kramer, Fordham UniversityIn this impressively researched book, John M. Picker has broken ground for a new field of social history, the widening of the Victorians aural experience, from street musicians to the phonograph and the telephone, and its significant bearing on sound and silence in the literary works of the period.--Richard D. Altick, Ohio State UniversityIn this wonderfully rich contribution to the history of sensory experience, John Picker demonstrates that Victorian daily life was increasingly awash in sounds both subtle and strident--from the lapping of waves and the uproar of street noises to phonographed recordings of human voices. Combining accounts of science and technology with analyses of literary representations, Pickers case studies authoritatively establish the importance of a sensory modality to whose meanings a wide range of Victorian writers were remarkably attentive.--Janice Carlisle, Tulane UniversityAbout the AuthorJohn M. Picker is Associate Professor of English at Harvard Universitybr
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