Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies

Sam See

Published by Fordham University Press 2020

Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies

Sam See
Edited by: Christopher Looby and Michael North
With contributions by: Heather Love and Wendy Moffat

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823287017

Overview
Contents

About this book

Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies collects in two parts the scholarly work—both published and unpublished—that Sam See had completed as of his death in 2013.

In Part I, in a thorough reading of Darwin, See argues that nature is constantly and aimlessly variable, and that nature itself might be considered queer. In Part II, See proposes that, understood as queer in this way, nature might be made the foundational myth for the building of queer communities.

With essays by Scott Herring, Heather Love, and Wendy Moffat.

Collects work, published and unpublished, of a promising young scholar who died prematurely.

Author / Editor information

See Sam :

Sam See was a scholar of Modernist literature and sexuality studies and Assistant Professor of English at Yale University.Looby Christopher :

Christopher Looby is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.North Michael :

Michael North is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.Herring Scott :

Scott Herring is the James H. Rudy Professor in the English Department at Indiana University. He is also affiliated with the Kinsey Institute, the Cultural Studies Program, the Department of Gender Studies, and the Department of American Studies. He is the author of three books: The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York University Press, 2010), and Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (University of Chicago Press, 2007). He received B.A. degrees in both English
and History from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Love Heather :

Heather K. Love is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press, 2007). She has edited and co-edited special issues of Representations (“Description Across Disciplines,” with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, 2016), GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (on the work of anthropologist Gayle Rubin, 2010), and New Literary History (“Is There Life after Identity Politics?,” 2000). She received her A.B. in Literature from Harvard University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia.Moffat Wendy :

Wendy Moffat is Professor of English at Dickinson College, where she holds the Curley Chair in Global Education. She is the author of A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), which received the Biographer’s Club Prize in 2010 and was runner-up for the PEN Biography Prize in 2011. Her forthcoming book, Wounded Minds (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), recounts the psychic cost of WWI through the stories of two Americans who risked their lives in France: psychiatrist Thomas Salmon, who brought treatment directly to the battlefield, and journalist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who was nearly killed covering the Marne battles for The New Republic. She received her Ph.D. in English from Yale University.Sam See (Author)
Sam See was a scholar of Modernist literature and sexuality studies and Assistant Professor of English at Yale University.

Christopher Looby (Edited By)
Christopher Looby is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Michael North (Edited By)
Michael North is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Reviews

George Chauncey, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University:
Sam See’s stunningly original and profoundly generative essays urge us to recognize the queerness of nature and the critical role of myth making in queer community formation. Brilliant, supple, deeply learned, and wide-ranging, the essays bear witness to the powerful mind and generous spirit we lost far too soon.

Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago:
In these bold, original essays written against a slew of hardened academic orthodoxies, Sam See shows his work to have been radically ahead of its time. Recovering an underexamined mode of queer aesthetics grounded in nature and myth running through the heart of modernism, See’s incisive readings of Darwin, Wilde, Woolf, Hughes, Eliot, Hemingway, and others are nothing less than field-changing. Thank you, Chris Looby and Michael North, and also the writers of the insightful companion essays, for this eagerly-awaited collection of works by a brilliant and fearless critic: one willing to revisit categories in which so many of us were taught to feel ashamed of showing interest, in order to bring sex back into the aesthetic and the aesthetic back into sex.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I. Queer natures
Charles Darwin, queer theorist Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	11
The comedy of nature: Darwinian feminism in Virginia Woolf’s between the acts Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	50
Art for science’s sake: Wilde in Whitman’s wilderness Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	90
Exfoliating modernist realism: Carpenter, Darwin, and Forster Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	97
“Spectacles in color”: the primitive drag of Langston Hughes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	106
Epilogue: the myth of nature Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	134
Part II. Queer mythologies
Fast books read slow: the shapes of speed in Manhattan transfer and the sun also rises Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
Making modernism new: queer mythology in the young and evil Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	194
American failurism: hart crane’s the bridge and Kenneth Burke’s paradox of purity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
The cruelty of breeding: queer time in the waste land Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	258
Essays
The ancients and the queer moderns Scott Herring Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	271
Contrary / sexual / feeling Heather Love Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	288
Late Sam see Wendy Moffat Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	300
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	309
Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	311
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	313

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 336
Keywords: Literary Studies; Queer Theory

eBook

Published: January 7, 2020
ISBN: 9780823287017