Please join the Affect and the Emotions Workshop
on Monday, May 4 when
Leland Jasperse
PhD Student
English Language and Literature
University of Chicago
presents the paper:
“Henry James’s Queer Realism, or, The Spoils of Pleasure”
Monday, May 4 | 4:30-6pm
Zoom: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/95840755556
Respondent: Michal Zechariah, English
Description: In this paper, I turn to drives in Henry James’s essays and novella “Beast in the Jungle.” I argue that drives, which bring together Taylorite transformations to the workplace and the libdinalization of “the human” in the late 19th century, are a key site understanding James’s relationship to erotics, which is inextricable from realism’s breakdown into naturalism and romance. Critiquing paradigmatic queer readings of James, which find his writings exemplary of desire’s free reign, I ask: can we instead read the unsexed, the aromantic, and low-intensity attachment productively, without having to hand them back over to the sexual? Doing so cues us to the difficult and invisibilized work of maintaining intimacies outside erotic and romantic contexts, which I argue is key to James’s late realist project.
The paper, to be read in advance, will be distributed to the Affect and the Emotions Workshop mailing list and is available in the post below with a password.
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Image: Alvin Langon Coburn, Saltram’s Seat, 1907.
