Contrary/Sexual/Feeling

See's thinking is out ahead of the field, or in opposition to it: in his questioning of the epistemological ground and the political effects of anti-essentialism; in his rethinking of the place of science and of Enlightenment values more broadly; and in his testing of anti-normativity as a framework for politics, See demurs from fundamental principles of queer studies.

Making Modernism New: Queer Mythology in The Young and Evil

The Young and Evil’s queerness undergirds its most consummately modernist ambitions: to renovate myth for modern purposes and to create folklore for a burgeoning ethnic community.

Epilogue: The Myth of Nature

The concept of queer natures developed throughout the twentieth century developed into a communal myth. Nature served as a source of mythological belief in the materiality of sexual and aesthetic feeling for queers throughout the twentieth century and became a source of political organization.

Late Sam See

A consideration of See’s two projects: one challenging the status of nature within queer studies, the other proposing a new theory of the orientation toward myth of queer politics. Memories of See as a reader and teacher.

The Ancients and the Queer Moderns

See performs a revivification of queer modernist studies that connects up with ancient times.

“Spectacles in Color”: The Primitive Drag of Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes’s “Spectacles in Color” envisions Harlem culture as a drag performance. The Weary Blues records a lyric history of modernist Harlem in poems that perform in drag, an aesthetic of visual crossing. This aesthetic ironically coincides with and also countermands the identitarian stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory.

The Cruelty of Breeding: Queer Time in The Waste Land

Reproductive sexuality is the inevitable precondition for what is actually wasted in The Waste Land. The poem exists in a dialectical queer time that simultaneously propels, reverses, and freezes the motion of heterotemporality.

Fast Books Read Slow: The Shapes of Speed in

Transfer and Rises mimetically reproduce the effects of speed technology at the levels of narrative structure and texture to create literary space in a culture where technology depleted physical space, both literally and perceptually. These novels embrace technological innovation but not so uncritically as to use its speed to annihilate time and space.

Charles Darwin, Queer Theorist

Darwin conceptualizes nature as a non-normative, infinitely heterogeneous composite of mutating laws and principles. Contextualizing queer literature within a Darwinian framework presents opportunities to reassess contemporary literary histories of modernism that oppose modernist aesthetics, positivist science, and theoretical orthodoxies about the conceptual dangers of nature.

American Failurism: Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Kenneth Burke’s Paradox of Purity

Hart Crane acknowledged the problem of creating a representative tale of the American tribe. Unlike other writers, however, Crane harnessed the long poem’s generic incapacity to universalize experience as his poem’s central structural and thematic principle. This failure of linguistic union is analogous to the failure of sexual union, but these broken erotic unions open space for poetic expressions of an unidealized myth of homosexual union.