Loving Literature

Queer Melancholia

“…''Since the dawn of the literary era, readers have been getting ready to bid literature a final farewell,'' claims Lynch, because the mourning and yearning for the past internal to the elegiac mode of literary studies ultimately comes to identify literature itself as the object of its grief. 75 Literary studies from the start, thus, labors under a death sentence and persists in a perpetual state of posthumousness. It is the posthumousness of literary studies that queer theory inherits.…”

Jane Austen, Secret Celebrity, and Mass Eroticism

“…can appear as an infringement on one's individuality." 6 The readerly fantasy she traces is accordingly one of taking the book out of circulation-of loving it more ardently and more specifically than anyone else. The social form that subtends this fantasy is that of the "steady and steadying affection" of "long-haul intimacy," in which "a reader's marriage to his books" might resemble "marriage to a person."…”

These Newcomes: William Makepeace Thackeray and Novelistic Particularity

“…But as there remains something perversely or heroically-in any case, irreducibly-particular about our professional practices, understanding novels as objects that signify to us through their familiarity is an opportunity to investigate "the entanglements of the institutional and the intimate" as sources of interpretive, formal, and ethical knowledge, and to defend what literary texts have to offer in the public sphere as objects of private experience. 10 Through a sustained close reading of Thackeray's 1855 novel The Newcomes, this essay argues that a tension between the continuous or particular experience of an individual novel and the felt historical pressure of novels en masse registers in the text itself as a formal and narrative problem. Drawing on recent critical methods that have emphasized the sociological and network structures of narrative, I suggest how the sprawling intertextual references and relationships crosshatched throughout The Newcomes-a novel that G. K. Chesterton described as being for this reason "all one novel" with its predecessors (Vanity Fair [1848] and The History of Pendennis [1850]) and successor (The Adventures of Philip [1862])-feeds the compulsion for familiarity in returning readers.…”