Dialogue and deviance : male-male desire in the dialogue genre - plato to aelred, plato to sade ..., plato to the postmodern

et me begin by frankly acknowledging that I have come to this project as an amateur, in all senses of the word. "Amateur," for one thing, suggests a lack of professional expertise. Many of the texts I consider in this book might properly be classified as "philosophical dialogues," and, as an English professor with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, I indeed lack formal training in philosophy. Furthermore, my academic specialization in medieval English and French literature has been only tangentially relevant to most of the texts considered here, linking as they do ancient Greece and Rome with early modern Italy, Enlightenment France, twentieth-century America, and several modern European cultures, as well as with the high Middle Ages. Important as professional specialization undoubtedly is in the modern academy, however, I would also argue that the academy should always make room for educated amateurs, for those willing to step outside their "areas" and try to see a bigger picture. And "amateur" also means "lover"; it is as a lover that I come to these texts. I read Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus seriously for the first time when I encountered them on the Brown University Comparative Literature department's list of "set books" for graduate students, and it was love at first sight. Fusty and old-fashioned as it must seem to a younger generation of queer scholars, Plato helped me, like Oscar Wilde, André Gide, E. M. Forster's Maurice, and Mary Renault's Laurie, come to terms with my own sexuality. And it is as a modern gay man-all terms I use deliberatelyseeking to unite my private and professional lives, my love and my work, that I first envisioned this project. My hope is that the positive qualities of the amateur may outweigh the deficiencies, and I have included throughout the following chapters references to recent professionals in these different fields for the benefit of those who wish to follow up some aspect of my argument-or argue against it-in greater detail. A note on languages: I am a native speaker of English, and have studied several of the other languages in which these texts were originally written in a formal classroom setting: French and German as an undergraduate, Latin in graduate school. In others, Greek and Italian, I am self-taught. In the following pages, I quote English translations of non-English texts, but in every case I have consulted editions-often more than one-in the texts' original languages as well, and I discuss specific word choices with some frequency, as is required by my primarily descriptive method, which is heavily dependent upon close readings. Several friends and colleagues have read all or part of this book in manuscript form, and I have greatly benefited from their comments; in particular, I wish to thank in this regard Ed Johnson, Catherine Loomis, and Miriam Youngerman Miller. Marlena Corcoran first made me think I might have something to say about Plato, and her continued encouragement and enthusiasm for this project have been immeasurably important to me. I also wish to acknowledge the important contributions that my home institution, the University of New Orleans, made to the research for this book: consistent travel funding, a sabbatical in the spring of 2002, and a University Research Professorship beginning in the fall of that year provided the mobility and the time off essential to the completion of such a project. Specifically, I thank John Cooke, Rick Barton, Shirley Laska, Bob Cashner, and Miriam Youngerman Miller. I also gratefully acknowledge the extraordinary efforts of the Earle K. Long Library's Interlibrary Loan department in tracking down obscure and far-flung research materials. Special thanks must go to my colleagues over the years in the team-taught University Honors course on ancient Greek culture, Arts and Sciences This book traces the historical relationship between male-male erotic desire and the genre of literary or philosophical dialogue. It describes three literary-philosophical traditions, each of which originates in a different Platonic dialogue whose subsequent influence can be traced, first, through the Roman and medieval periods; second, through the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods; and, finally, through the modern and postmodern periods. Sturges demonstrates that various forms of erotic deviance have been differently valued in these different periods and cultures, and that dialogue has consistently proven to be the genre of choice for expressing these changing values. This study provides a valuable historical perspective on current debates over the place of homosexuality in modern Western culture. Cover 1 Contents 8 Preface 10 Introduction 12 1 Erotics of Friendship: From Plato's Lysis to Aelred of Rievaulx 24 2 Spiritual Erotics: From Plato's Symposium to Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir 84 3 Erotic Style: From Plato's Phaedrus to the Modern Novel 166 Conclusion: Deviant Erotics from Plato to the Postmodern 232 Notes 246 Index 291 A 291 B 292 C 293 D 294 E 295 F 296 G 296 H 297 I 298 J 298 K 298 L 299 M 299 N 300 O 301 P 301 Q 303 R 303 S 303 T 306 U 306 V 306 W 306 X 307 Y 307 Z 307 Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction....Pages 1-12 Erotics of Friendship: From Plato’s Lysis to Aelred of Rievaulx....Pages 13-72 Spiritual Erotics: From Plato’s Symposium to Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir....Pages 73-154 Erotic Style: From Plato’s Phaedrus to the Modern Novel....Pages 155-220 Conclusion: Deviant Erotics from Plato to the Postmodern....Pages 221-234 Back Matter....Pages 235-297