Posted on 04/20/2009 8:51:56 PM PDT by Borges
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose critical writings on the ambiguities of sexual identity in fiction helped create the discipline known as queer studies, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 58.
The cause was breast cancer, her husband, Hal Sedgwick, said.
Ms. Sedgwick broke new ground when, drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault, she began teasing out the hidden socio-sexual subplots in writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James. In a 1983 essay on Dickens’s novel “Our Mutual Friend,” she drew attention to the homoerotic element in the obsessive relationship between Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone, rivals for the love of Lizzie Hexam but emotionally most fully engaged when facing off against each other.
Several of her essays became lightning rods for critics of poststructuralism, multiculturalism and gay studies — most notoriously “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1989. In it, Ms. Sedgwick argued that Austen’s descriptions of the restless Marianne Dashwood in “Sense and Sensibility” should be understood in relation to contemporary thought on the evils of “self-abuse.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
What did you think of her work? :)
Another phony academic responsible for the destruction of Western civilization.
Good riddance to bad rubbish may Ted Kennedy soon follow.
Exactly. You can call a turd a rose but it is still a turd.
The poor woman probably died of boredom, may she rest in peace.
This is what has become of college English Departments.
THey HATE literature, and they HATE life.
Reading any of their work is drudgery, and the drudgery that got it produced in the first place was carried on by them as if it constituted some deadly serious yet necessary cultural pursuit.
I have always read for pleasure, and all the great novels can be and should be read that way.
I even read critics for pleasure, and none of these types of critic yields ANY pleasure. The terminology of all the various “Studies” fields taught now, and for the last 3 decades or so is like a high fence designed to keep normal people out, and most of us will stay out by choice.
These critics always seem to be practicing some form of forensic medicine on the written word: they go poking around with their instruments on the bodies in the morgue, to see what caused the death, and they never realize it’s them and their “techniques” that killed the patient, Literature. They drain the life out of everyone and everything they study.
And having said all the above, she’s probably not one tenth as bad as the majority of run of the mill English profs. Their work will make your teeth hurt.
Looking for gayness everywhere. What a life’s work. /s
no. We must not act like the goons on Democratic Underground.
when a woman dies, we are supposed to offer prayers to their family and let them rest in peace.
You can have two men fighting to the death for a woman, yet the Pervert propagandists would have you believe it’a all over a quivering sphincter.
RIP.
Reading for pleasure, SD? Me, too. ‘Twas Andrew Klavan, I believe, who recently wrote, “The single hardest thing to do in the arts is not to shock or disturb or sear or radicalize—but to delight.” God bless Klavan, and God bless all authors who do endeavor to delight.
Lots of Literary Departments don’t even teach the classics anymore. Classes on gay and lesbian authors and poets abound.
I agree. The worst class I ever took in college was some short story literature class. The instructor was some pervert who took pleasure in finding outrageously kinky subtexts in every story. I did horribly in that class cause I just don’t and cannot think in that fashion. My mind isn’t warped enough.
Good riddance is in order.
I’ve only known about Klavan for roughly 2 years, but I have said the EXACT same thing: only the good and great writers know how to delight: a corollary of recognizing that for writing to be worthwhile, it has to be alive in THE WRITING, not the SENTIMENT. THere are plenty of writers who would have, could have been much better had they forsaken some of that hectoring, lecturing,didactic, master-of-the-obvious stuff, for more “artistry”. No, their biggest talent is their basic humorlessness, and the desire to INSTRUCT. Think of the late Arthur Miller, not without talent, and the occasional flare-ups of artistry, but all of it subservient to the BIG POLITICAL LESSONS he thought were more important.He produced drama that teaches you WHAT to think, rather than HOW to think, (if think is important at all in drama, which I am not so sure about)/
As for the academics, the current vogue is probably still “deconstruction” , a subsidiary tool in the political toolbag which can be handed over as needed, on approval, for would-be deep thinker academic critics.
“I can deconstruct it for you” is what they say when you ask them how they liked a certain poem.
I once mentioned how much I liked a poet named C. K. Williams, and this prof, a female, said “He’s a womanizer!”
This was most likely based on a piece of scuttlebut that circulated around the English Department around the time Mr. WIlliams did a poetry reading at this University, but it certainly had nothing to do with his poetry.....
yet it was enough as a first and last statement about him from the tendentious academic critic: after all, what “deconstruction” technique is all about is finding
“the weakest link” in any writer’s perceived mindset, those little deeply hidden pseudo-Freudian “assumptions” that reveal the Colonialist, the Imperialist, or the Misogynist Within.
We’re in rare agreement. You’re 100% correct in that more prayers and less derision is called for.
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