Browsing by Subject "Queer temporalities"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Strange times : dissident temporalities and the remaking of history in contemporary fiction(2015-08) Howell, Judith Hazel; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Houser, Heather; Bennett, Chad; Kevorkian, Martin; Lesser, WayneThis dissertation argues that a cluster of contemporary novelists experiment with temporalities in order to challenge the still-dominant Enlightenment view that history moves forward in a linear progression. In directing critical attention to the temporal representation of history in recent fiction, I trace a shift in contemporary preoccupations away from the postmodern concerns about the relationship of history to language, narrativity, and knowability and toward the way that temporal adjustment revises historical thinking. I show that a number of contemporary authors eschew the conventional linkages between time and history that normally structure our engagement with the past. Rather than cut the ties between time and history, however, these texts remake them through unusual temporal frameworks. I develop this argument using three case studies, which demonstrate how a particular historiographical concept—traditionally undergirded by progressivist ideologies—changes under the influence of an unconventional representation of time. Using Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003) and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), I show how queer temporalities, which reject the compulsory rhythms that often govern heteronormative culture, reconfigure archives by considering the inclusion of intentionally falsified documentation. Two works by African American novelists—Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999) and Kiese Laymon’s Long Division (2013)—feature a temporality I call the unified now, which envisions time as past, present, and future folded together in a single unit. This temporality allows them to remake the idea of futurity by exploring how future hopes for social improvement might be realized in the present. Finally, Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010) and Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2003) alter the concept of historical scale by considering deep time that requires us to stretch our notion of history from the Big Bang to the death of our planet. They argue that this expansion of scale is the only way to come to terms with humanity’s effect on the natural world. I contend that an exploration of these temporal reorientations is crucial to understanding the contemporary historical imagination and to discovering new ways of perceiving ourselves, defining cultural and social progress, and living responsibly.Item To cut the past : queer touch, medieval materiality, and the craft of wonder(2016-05) Jewell, Brianna Carolyn; Lesser, Wayne; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Birkholz, Daniel; Johnson, MichaelThis dissertation emerges from a multivocal conversation in queer, affect, and medievalist scholarship, which privileges encounters with fragmentary details to create and describe connections between bodies separated in time and space. From Carolyn Dinshaw’s metaphorics of touch and “partial connection” across time to Roland Barthes’s punctum that joins disparate bodies, scholars invoke and rely on the fragmentary to describe and generate affective connections. This project makes that shared understanding explicit, literal, and literary – and also gives it a deeper history – by showing how medieval poets crafted and emphasized fragmentary tropes to enable connections that might not otherwise exist. Each chapter reads a medieval literary object – the bodily cut; stained glass; and, the grafted tree – as a fragmentary trope through which mutually exclusive entities (the dead and the living, the past and the present, and the earthly and the celestial) can be imagined as coming together and coexisting. Through graphic and sustained descriptions of the body and bodily sensations, both medieval and contemporary authors betray an interest in the visceral qualities of their fragmentary tropes, and rely on that viscerality to describe various forms of partial connection. _To Cut the Past_ works to show that wonder, and specifically the openendedness and multiplicity that wonder generates, is the primary affect in establishing affective relationships between metaphysically disconnected entities. Encounters with the fragmentary objects I read create wonder, and that wonder in turn creates a portal or touchstone that allows access to perhaps otherwise unreachable worlds and things. The medieval texts I read show the process by which wonder connects. Ultimately, as I outline, this insight can be extended to pedagogy. By accepting an invitation from contemporary scholarship and medieval poets, we may encourage students to become alive to the fragments that stick out to them (the textual details to which they connect viscerally) in medieval and postmedieval texts, and to use those fragments as points of access to initiate their readings. This reading orientation works not only to make medieval literature relevant and interesting to students, and to offer a new way of understanding themselves and what matters to them; it also provides historically-enriched insight into the medieval past.