Reading Sideways (eBook)

The Queer Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction

Dana Seitler (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2019
208 Seiten
Fordham University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8232-8264-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Reading Sideways explores the role various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. Each chapter takes a different art form as its object: sculpture, portraiture, homecraft, and opera, which appear in the major works of the period central to questions of gender, race, and sexuality, including those by Henry James, Davis, Willa Cather, Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman.

---

Reading Sideways explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality in works of modern American literature. It tracks the crosswise circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction and argues that at stake in the aesthetic turn of these works was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience but also an engagement with political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and sexual expression. To track these engagements, its author, Dana Seitler, performs a method she calls "e;lateral reading,"e; a mode of interpretation that moves horizontally through various historical entanglements and across the fields of the arts to make sense of-and see in a new light-their connections, challenges, and productive frictions. Each chapter takes a different art form as its object: sculpture, portraiture, homecraft, and opera. These art forms appear in some of the major works of literature of the period central to negotiations of gender, race, and sexuality, including those by Henry James, Davis, Willa Cather, Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. But the literary texts that each chapter of this book takes as its motivation not only include a specific art form or object as central to its politics, they also build an alternative aesthetic vocabulary through which they seek to alter, challenge, or participate in the making of social and sexual life. By cultivating a counter-aesthetics of the unfinished, the uncertain, the small, the low, and the allusive, these fictions recognize other ways of knowing and being than those oriented toward reductively gendered accounts of beauty, classed imperatives established by the norms of taste, or apolitical treatises of sexual disinterestedness. And within them and through reading sideways we can witness the coming-into-legibility of a set of diffuse practices that provide a pivot point for engaging the political methods of minoritized subjects at the turn of the twentieth century.

Autor

Dana Seitler is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in Modern America.

Inhalt

List of Illustrations | vii

Introduction | 1

1. Strange Beauty | 15

2. Small Collectivity and the Low Arts | 43

3. The Impossible Art Object of Desire | 75

4. Willa Cather and W. E. B. Du Bois Go to the Opera | 112

Part One: A Continuous Repetition of Sound | 116

Part Two: Endless Melody | 138

Conclusion | 159

Acknowledgments | 163

Notes | 167

Index | 187

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.7.2019
• Zusatzinfo: 18
• Verlagsort: New York
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
• Schlagworte: Aesthetics and Politics • American Fiction • Gender and Sexuality • queer aesthetics
• ISBN-10: 0-8232-8264-3 / 0823282643
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-8264-7 / 9780823282647