Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"In this remarkable work, Kevin Ohi makes an extraordinarily compelling account of the queer ways that beauty, bodies, and desires circulate and continue to ‘live on’ as literary texts. Dead Letters Sent makes clear that Ohi has become one of the most accomplished, and one of the most ‘transmissive,’ literary critics of his generation."—Michael Moon, Emory University
"While many queer theorists attest to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influence on their work, Kevin Ohi’s book truly expands the reflective practice of queer pedagogy. This is a beautifully written book."—Nicholas de Villiers, author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol
"Dead Letters Sent is itself a model of queer transmission, one that may well inspire and inform future work in literary studies. "—American Literary History
"Ohi’s careful attention to his primary texts offers many rewards."—Modern Philology
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction
Part I
1. Queer Transmission and The Symposium: Insult, Gay Suicide, and the Staggered Temporalities of Consciousness
2. Forgetting The Tempest
Part II
3. Tradition in Fragments: Swinburne’s “Anactoria”
4. Queer Atavism and Pater’s Aesthetic Sensibility: “Hippolytus Veiled” and “The Child in the House”
Part III
5. “That Strange Mimicry of Life by the Living”: Queer Reading in Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.”
6. Erotic Bafflement and the Lesson of Oscar Wilde: De Profundis
Part IV
7. Lessons of the Master: Henry James’s Queer Pedagogy
8. The Beast’s Storied End
Part V
9. “My Spirit’s Posthumeity” and the Sleeper’s Outflung Hand: Queer Transmission in Absalom, Absalom!
10. “Vanished but not gone, fixed and held in the annealing dust”: Initiations and Endings in Go Down, Moses
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
