Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review "Contingent Figure is a book for the very best readers. Its meditation on chronic pain reimagines formalism’s intimate attention to bodily distress, in turn impelling queer theory to reckon with how incapacity feels as opposed to just the uses to which it is put politically. Poetic, incisive, and continually surprising, Contingent Figure is one of a kind."—Elizabeth Freeman, author of Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century
"To learn the meaning of memory in the ruins of love, that is Michael D. Snediker's dare. The pages on Melville are harrowing and majestic, a wildly beautiful summons to throw ourselves into the visceral depths. Contingent Figure pushed me to experience both the deepest philosophy and the most obstinate invitation to the tremors of the flesh."—Colin Dayan, author of Animal Quintet: A Southern Memoir
"Contingent Figure provides a timely defense, as well as a magisterial illustration, of what a literary reading of literary texts can achieve."—ALH Online Review
Table of ContentsContents
Preface: Crasher
Introduction: “So Much for My Figurative Self”; or, Aesthetic Duress (Plein-Air, in Parts)
1. Melville’s Iron Crown of Lombardy: Phenomenology beyond the Phantom Limb
2. Queer Philology and Chronic Pain
3. “The Vision – pondered long”: Chronic Pain and the Materiality of Figuration
4. Inveterate Pagoda: Late James, Ongoingness, and the Figure of Hurt
5. Is the Rectangle a Grave? Floating Attention, Betweenness in Relief
6. Weaver’s Handshake: The Aesthetics of Chronic Objects
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
