Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies
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Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies collects in two parts the scholarly work—both published and unpublished—that Sam See had completed as of his death in 2013.
In Part I, in a thorough reading of Darwin, See argues that nature is constantly and aimlessly variable, and that nature itself might be considered queer. In Part II, See proposes that, understood as queer in this way, nature might be made the foundational myth for the building of queer communities.
With essays by Scott Herring, Heather Love, and Wendy Moffat.
In these bold, original essays written against a slew of hardened academic orthodoxies, Sam See shows his work to have been radically ahead of its time. Recovering an underexamined mode of queer aesthetics grounded in nature and myth running through the heart of modernism, See’s incisive readings of Darwin, Wilde, Woolf, Hughes, Eliot, Hemingway, and others are nothing less than field-changing. Thank you, Chris Looby and Michael North, and also the writers of the insightful companion essays, for this eagerly-awaited collection of works by a brilliant and fearless critic: one willing to revisit categories in which so many of us were taught to feel ashamed of showing interest, in order to bring sex back into the aesthetic and the aesthetic back into sex.---Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago
Sam See’s stunningly original and profoundly generative essays urge us to recognize the queerness of nature and the critical role of myth making in queer community formation. Brilliant, supple, deeply learned, and wide-ranging, the essays bear witness to the powerful mind and generous spirit we lost far too soon.---George Chauncey, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University
In Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies, Sam See upends queer theory’s emphasis on social construction and its suspicion of an innate queerness. Instead, he argues that it is possible to frame queerness as a nature without capitulating to the sexological thinking that positioned sexual difference as a degenerate threat... If this was work See could not finish in a life cut abruptly short, it is work that we, as inheritors, can extend. In part, that continuation is the nature of scholarship. But it is perhaps even more a part of the mythos of queerness to imagine new worlds—especially from the fragments of thought that our peers, much like their predecessors, leave in their absence to our interpretation.---Will Clark, ASAP Journal
Sam See was a scholar of Modernist literature and sexuality studies and Assistant Professor of English at Yale University.
Christopher Looby (Edited By)
Christopher Looby is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Michael North (Edited By)
Michael North is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Introduction | 1
Part I: Queer Natures
Charles Darwin, Queer Theorist | 11
The Comedy of Nature: Darwinian Feminism
in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts | 50
Art for Science’s Sake: Wilde in Whitman’s Wilderness | 90
Exfoliating Modernist Realism: Carpenter,
Darwin, and Forster | 97
“Spectacles in Color”: The Primitive Drag
of Langston Hughes | 106
Epilogue: The Myth of Nature | 134
Part II: Queer Mythologies
Fast Books Read Slow: The Shapes of Speed
in Manhattan Transfer and The Sun Also Rises | 159
Making Modernism New: Queer Mythology
in The Young and Evil | 194
American Failurism: Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Kenneth
Burke’s Paradox of Purity | 229
The Cruelty of Breeding: Queer Time in The Waste Land | 258
Essays
The Ancients and the Queer Moderns
Scott Herring | 271
Contrary / Sexual / Feeling
Heather Love | 288
Late Sam See
Wendy Moffat | 300
Acknowledgments | 309
List of Contributors | 311
Index | 313
