The Modernist Art of Queer Survival (Modernist Literature and Culture)

This book explores an archive of modernist literature that conceives survival as a collective enterprise linking lives across boundaries of race, time, class, species, gender, and sexuality. As social Darwinism promoted a selfish, competitive, and combatively individualistic understanding of survival, the four modernists examined here countered by imagining how postures of precarity, vulnerability, and receptivity can breed pleasurably and environmentally sustainable modes of interdependent survival. These modes prove particularly vital and appealing to queer bodies, desires, and intimacies deemed unfit, abnormal, or unproductive by heterosexist ideologies. Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” opposes “survival of the fittest” doctrines and Progressive-era masculinity with a feminist-inspired cultivation of ecological humility and interspecies collaboration. Oscar Wilde develops an autobiographical form that expresses collective subjectivity in __De Profundis__, an epistolary testament to the constitutive role of suffering in queer community formation. E. M. Forster imagines, in __Howards End__, how queer ideas and intimacies survive courtesy of invitations that awaken both inviters and invitees to unexpected relational possibilities freed from conventional timelines of development and realization. In Forster’s __A Passage to India__, the pursuit of “queer invitations” models an evolutionary succession defined by careful attention to creaturely inheritance and by ethical responses to the countless lives, including those obfuscated by imperial privilege, required for the successful survival of any individual life. Finally, Willa Cather’s short and long fiction, including “Consequences,” __Lucy Gayheart__, and __The Professor’s House__, argues for suicide as a way of life as it transforms the impulse to throw life away into an ethical alternative to the greedy logics of capitalism. Whether we speak of queer bodies targeted for harassment, queer sensibilities derided as dangerous, or queer intimacies denied legitimacy, we acknowledge a close companionship between queerness and precariousness. Queerness remains continuously under threat; these threats to survival can be immediate, as in the AIDS crises, or more subtle and entrenched. Many queer lives thus end prematurely and drastically-but not all end in the physical expiration of life. Some terminate gradually and even unconsciously in the countless concessions to normativity demanded by dominant cultures that perceive, through a perverse set of projective identifications, their own survival as imperiled by queerness. The Modernist Art of Queer Survival explores an archive of modernist archive of modernist literature that conceives survival as a collective enterprise linking lives across boundaries of race, time, class, species, gender, and sexuality. As social Darwinism promoted a selfish, competitive, and combatively individualistic understanding of survival, the five modernists examined in The Modernist Art of Queer Survival countered by imagining how postures of precarity, vulnerability, humility, and receptivity can breed pleasurably and ecologically sustainable modes of interdependent survival. These modes prove particularly vital and appealing to queer bodies, desires, and intimacies deemed unfit, abnormal, or unproductive by heterosexist ideologies. Authors and texts discussed include Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle," Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, E.M. Forster's Howards End and A Passage to India, and Willa Cather's "Consequences" and Lucy Gayheart. Whether we speak of queer bodies targeted for harassment, queer sensibilities derided as dangerous, or queer intimacies denied legitimacy, we acknowledge a close companionship between queerness and precariousness. Queerness remains continuously under threat; these threats to survival can be immediate, as in the AIDS crises, or more subtle and entrenched. Many queer lives thus end prematurely and drastically-but not all end in the physical expiration of life. Some terminate gradually and even unconsciously in the countless concessions to normativity demanded by dominant cultures that perceive, through a perverse set of projective identifications, their own survival as imperiled by queerness. The Modernist Art of Queer Survival explores an archive of modernist archive of modernist literature that conceives survival as a collective enterprise linking lives across boundaries of race, time, class, species, gender, and sexuality. As social Darwinism promoted a selfish, competitive, and combatively individualistic understanding of survival, the five modernists examined in The Modernist Art of Queer Survival countered by imagining how postures of precarity, vulnerability, humility, and receptivity can breed pleasurably and ecologically sustainable modes of interdependent survival. These modes prove particularly vital and appealing to queer bodies, desires, and intimacies deemed unfit, abnormal, or unproductive by heterosexist ideologies. Authors and texts discussed include Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle," Oscar Wilde's De Profundis , E.M. Forster's Howards End and A Passage to India , and Willa Cather's "Consequences" and Lucy Gayheart . Cover; The Modernist Art Of queer Survival; Copyright; Contents; Foreword; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. James's Animal Encounters; 2. Wilde's Messy Messianism; 3. Forster's Queer Invitation; 4. The Invitation's Success; 5. Cather's Survival By Suicide; Coda: Queerness's Bloody Narration; Master List Of Works Cited; Index Description Based Upon Print Version Of Record. Mode Of Access: World Wide Web. Drawing on a critical framework informed by queer theory and psychoanalysis, The Modernist Art of Queer Survival offers a new definition of survival, one that means more than merely the continuation of life. This book creates a literary archive of counterarguments to the conventional Darwinian evolutionary protocols of survival in early 20th century thought. Introduction: The Modernist Art Of Queer Survival -- Henry James's Animal Encounters -- Oscar Wilde's Messy Messianism -- Forster's Queer Invitation -- The Invitation's Success -- Cather's Survival By Suicide -- Coda: Queerness's Bloody Narration. Benjamin Bateman. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. This work explores an archive of modernist literature that conceives survival as a collective enterprise linking lives across boundaries of race, time, class, species, gender, and sexuality