Description
Book SynopsisOffering a new queer theorization of melodrama, Jonathan Goldberg explores the ways melodramatic film and literature provide an aesthetics of impossibility and how melodrama as a whole provides queer ways to promote identifications that exceed the bounds of the identity categories that regulate and constrain social life.
Trade Review"Apropos of his homo-topics, Goldberg writes beautifully, in prose vulnerable and oppositional that elevates academic vernacular to a higher aesthetic plane.... Lucky for us, Goldberg’s decided we can’t have our Hitchcock without our Highsmith, and aren’t they a lovely pair. He writes about music in Hitchcock (something rarely considered) and explores how Highsmith thematizes music in her novels.... [Y]ou will trust Goldberg’s fast-paced, suspenseful ekphrasis and delight in reliving these extraordinary reversals on the page."
-- Maxe Crandall * Lambda Literary Review *
"Goldberg achieves a greater, more nuanced understanding of melodrama’s potential for artistic and philosophical expression, as well as its unique importance for the study of media, gender, race, and sexuality." -- Matthew J. M. Grant * Film Criticism *
"Students of melodrama have long been drilled in the term’s literal meaning: music + drama. But before Jonathan Goldberg’s
Melodrama, few have had the chance to take the music seriously. With a rare combination of musical expertise and critical acumen, Goldberg puts the pieces together in this book. . . . Exceptional. . . ." -- Ned Schantz * Crticism *
"
Melodrama offers a distinctively queer theoretical contribution to the extensive scholarly work on melodrama in film and literary studies. The book is also a form of critical address that seeks to think with works of art the author clearly identifies with and also identifies as practicing a homo-aesthetics that traverses genres, media, and time." -- Victoria Hesford * GLQ *
Table of ContentsPreface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Part I. The Impossible Situation
1. Agency and Identity: The Melodrama in Beethoven's
Fidelio 3
2. Identity and Identification: Sirk—Fassbinder—Haynes 23
Part II.
Melos + Drama
3. The Art of Murder: Hitchcock and Highsmith 83
4. Wildean Aesthetics: From "Paul's Case" to
Lucy Gayheart 133
Coda 155
Notes 169
Bibliography 187
Index 197
